Outside Child
This post is a summary of an in-depth podcast found here.
I jotted down these thoughts today that are my personal experience and may not apply to everyone.
Still, perhaps this will resonate with you. Perhaps it gives you insight into how another artist feels, or perhaps, you have a different perspective that could help the community. If so let me know through email or DM. I will add your thoughts retroactively to the end of this episode. Your comments can be anonymous of course if you wish. It would be great to have your contribution, so that future listeners of this podcast, as well as myself, can benefit from your insights as well as my own.
Ok, so here I am at the end of another day. My shop, my clothes, my hair, the backyard, covered in sawdust. David Byrne is on the radio — Once In A Lifetime is playing. An entire green waste garbage can is filled to the brim with mahogany chips. I’ve tracked mud and paint in the house. I’ve been told I stand out just a little bit in the neighborhood, walking the dogs around the neighborhood in dust-caked Nike running pants and an old wood stained marathon t-Shirt, and I couldn’t be happier.
David Byrne is singing now, “And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"
I've been realizing more and more, as I write, and as I work, as I try to play and when I get serious, I realize perhaps like all of us, I’m incredibly frustrated by adult life. Full of rules that don’t help me be more happy or more fulfilled. Rules that just don’t suit me.
And, to the focus of this journal, I’m realizing that my obsession with natural aesthetics is linked to how I felt as a child. Let me explain what I mean and why this matters. And I’ll start way back at the beginning and, I’ll try to meander as much as possible.
Where I grew up
I was born in Walnut Creek, CA in the late seventies. I'm what they call an X-ennial, right there in-between GenX and Millennial generations. I was born post-Star Wars, post Atari, I still used paper maps in my car, even during college. I had no smart phone or social media.
Speaking of Xennial themes, Walnut Creek looked alot like the suburbs in E.T., half built homes on the edge of undeveloped land. And, I’m a few years younger than Drew Barrymore so that movie totally hit home when I was a kid.
Walnut Creek surrounds a large portion of Mount Diablo State Park, a mountain in the East Bay, East of San francisco, with a huge viewshed: you can see Yosemite 150 miles away. The city owns more open space per capita than any other community in the state of California. Just before I was born, Walnut Creek purchased 1,800 acres (730 ha) of undeveloped hillsides, ridge lines, and park sites.
All of which ran straight up to my backyard
At full view, these hills glow orange, rust and straw. I’d run them with friends, or often alone, day to night. I grew up building forts, climbing oak trees, getting whacked in the head with rocks, digging pits and all the other things many children do to explore the world in a Hands-On dirty and messy way, waiting for the street lights to come on to know that I was needed home for dinner.
Of course, before we would go inside, we would slide our shoes off the curb to scrape off the mud, leaving these telltale triangular wedges to dry in the Sun, a fairly common symbol that it was summer vacation.
I would see all kinds of wildlife there too on a daily basis, and I figured this was normal: owls, wild turkeys, turkey vultures, hawks, lizards, the occasional coyote.
Again, I assumed this was normal. I think if you grew up in a rural setting it would be. But, I was also living in a brand new suburban real estate development, on the edge of a completely undeveloped world, which created a unique time of flux between the natural and the concrete.
As the years went on those hills had more homes on them. Animals disappeared. All the wild things settled.
Adulthood makes me so sad
And I’m sure I gazed around less and less as I grew older. It seems like childhood left me slightly, one echo at a time.
You know, you’ll probably never realize the last time was your parent picked you up in their arms, but there was that one last time. I never realized when the last time it was for me to run through the hills, pulling cattails from my socks. But yeah, there was a last time that happened. I just don’t quite remember when. And I miss that way of being so much these days, for so many reasons.
Even if you didn't grow up in Walnut Creek, I think children are inclined to find ways to create their own worlds, their own special moments. Maybe drawing the floorplans of palaces on concrete sidewalks with chalk, or performing magic shows for the neighborhood to watch. Most children in the early 80’s ran outside to build a world of dreams.
Sidenote: I feel incredibly blessed to have had a childhood that I can look back on with great joy, but I know that isn't the case for everybody. I am not saying that everyone's childhood should be a source of inspiration and dreams. It’s too often not.
However, I do want to say that as a society we would be sad to hear how someone's childhood being robbed from them, in whatever way that was. I feel like we all would mourn that loss and feel something was taken from that person.
However, as adults, especially in the United States, we don't seem to mourn the abuse that’s endured in jobs, the stress of making ends meet, of how to save enough for a retirement that seems to get further and further away. In fact, it seems like this is expected of the Adult, that a rough and uphill battle is part of the journey, that a certain amount of misery, of difficulty and challenge to fit in and to make your way is required, that somehow struggle is what adulthood is. All of that seems very different than how we think about childhood’s innocence.
So yes, with those caveats aside, I miss my childhood.
Because since then, it has been adulthood all the way, which, has not lived up to all the hype to say the least.
My effort to find joy, or at least even solace, in a career, in a job of any kind, left me feeling completely empty by the time I was 40. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work and earn a living. I feel very blessed to have had some wonderful opportunities, and that's certainly nothing to discount. But my issue was never with work itself, but rather, the implicit requirements that adult life should be full of antagonistic, conformist, difficult and political notions, things we never imagined as children.
David Byrne is singing, “And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"
What I’ve disliked about adulthood and work life in particular, is a lack of the pursuit of joy. This was never the dream I had when I was a little child. Was this really the dream I had when I dug under rocks just to see what was there? This wasn't the dream I had when I was the most care free I ever was. Of course not, but geez Christopher, when are you going to grow up?
The Problem with adult hood is that in a effort to grow up I stopped gazing down, down at the world in front of me.
I was fortunate enough to be able to go to undergrad university. I chose to study business, mostly because I felt like it was a way to navigate the adult world. It also seemed like the best way to go to school and make sure I wasn’t a disappointment to anyone — I’ll probably have to explain more on that in a later episode. Still, no matter how hard I tried to live up to expectations, I admit my heart was never really in studying business.
I remember liking this particular class, because it was case study analysis and I love to solve problems. I liked listening to others’ ideas and offering observations about the problems we were studying. I liked my classmates, and also having a unique perspective, something I could add.
But one day in particular, I remember the professor asked me to meet him after class. “Christopher, I appreciate your enthusiasm, wanting to contribute, but I’m trying to get the class to focus with the time we have. We’re speeding down the highway, and you’re like, focused on this flower growing on the side of the road. If you want to continue, if you want to get this business degree, I need you to focus.”
Focused on a flower… a pejorative I’ll never forget. What I heard was, get narrow. What I heard was, stop asking questions. I remember feeling lost and ashamed after that meeting. I was young. As I said, I wanted to make sure I didn’t disappoint anyone. I shut up and never really talked about that until today.
Ironically, This was some of the best prep for my coming corporate life. Don’t rock the boat, fit in, and make sure me and the people on my teams don’t get distracted and keep moving down the freeway.
But I realize now, like 20+ years later, what a gift that could have been. I was on a different path and I wish so much that I could have listened the right way. Switched majors to, well, to study beautiful flowers. Forestry, or Poetry.
Even the metaphor he used, to be focused on freeway vs. instead of a flower, rings poignant to me these days. Of course that was me. It was always and always has been. Why couldn’t I just be ok with that?
The Problem with my adulthood is that I stopped gazing down. I rushed to become a part of this world, to learn the grid and how to operate within it.
Life told me who I should be before I had time to figure out who I was. I lost myself, and forgot Nature’s rules that I followed as a child. Run, move, feel, smell. Slip, slide, fall. Squint, stare and do everything with all you are in every moment. Unafraid.
Nowadays, I know I worry too much about what I look like. Vanity. I worry what others will think. Judgement. I seek approval. Conformity. I avoid derision. Shame. But a rose? While it may be beautiful to us (or maybe not), it doesn’t care what I think. In the truest sense, it is guileless. It doesn’t care what it is, where it is, it just does its best. I wouldn't even say it does its best, it just does what it does.
But, go on any social platform these days and you’ll find go-getters telling you to “act as if”, to “fake it till you make it”, in other words, to pretend to be the successful person you want to be until it actually happens for you.
But, to exist as a child, for me, was the opposite of that, it was to exist as genuinely as I have ever been, like the rose outside the window. Nothing faked. Free-form. Thoughts and feelings and emotions, uncontrolled and unconcerned with an outward appearance.
Yet, to exist as an adult seems to be to control those measures, to make sure what you are doing is presentable in an organized and consistent way. Beyond all the other things I could say this sounds very boring to me. Adulthood nags at me.
Today, I seek the same childlike life. My artist path is searching for my inner child, outside.
Why? Why does my childhood and my adulthood relate to a discussion of nature, art and design?
Because, as an artist, what I realize is that my pursuit for a more natural asymmetrical life comes from the same spirit as a pursuit for a more childlike one. My obsession with natural aesthetics is linked to how I felt as a child. I chafe at symmetrical grids the social rules.
I’m looking for joy
Invoking a childlike mind, and natural wild places both still bring me my purest moments of imagination, wonder, and acceptance of the ability to do nothing in particular and still be enough. That I am beautiful just as I am and I don't need to be or to do anything. That life is there for me to experience, not to win
More and more these days, it feels like adulthood is an abandonment of my childhood, in the same way my modern, controlled and designed lives omit the treasures of the outdoors. Life is hard enough as it is, and we will find our share of hardships. Why do we also insist on imposing rules, requirements and expectations about how we look, what we do, where we live, and what is ok to say out loud, rules that make us even more unhappy? =
I guess it makes sense that if joy for me was running through fields with mud on my shoes, that today I would be covered in sawdust, grease and wood putty, tracking it through the house to my wife's dismay, making a mess of things and listening to David Byrne.
I can’t think of a better mindset for being an artist.
Put simply, I reject the premise in order to discover your fullest potential, you must let go of childish ways. In fact, after my years of working corporate jobs I’m realizing it’s likely the opposite.
Perhaps the best life isn't making the most of everything, packing everything in as tightly as possible.
Perhaps it might be a good thing to stop and pick cattails out of my socks. To have mud on my shoes.
And to ask myself, "How did I get here?, How do I work this? Do I even need that large automobile?"
It’s ok to stop and ask questions.
It’s ok to focus the flower instead of the freeway.
At least sometimes.
There’s an alternative to the modern grid of adulthood. I have a model for how I can be, inspiration is right there, right outside my window.
I jotted down these thoughts today, more for myself than anyone else, perhaps more than other journals in this series so far.
Still, I hope this resonates with you. Perhaps it gives you insight into how another artist feels, or perhaps, you have a different perspective that could help the community. If so let me know through email or DM. New podcast technology now lets me add your thoughts retroactively to the end of this episode. Your comments can be anonymous of course if you wish. It would be great to have your contribution, so that future listeners of this podcast, as well as myself, can benefit from your insights as well as my own.
If you’re particularly interested in how we can create more positive work environments, a lot of great thinkers are doing really interesting work on this topic. If you're interested, I highly encourage you to check out Tosca fosso's management detox, a series of podcast episodes talking about what's wrong with corporate culture and how it can be addressed and fixed. Full disclosure, Tosca is my beautiful wife.
