At the risk of being misunderstood, I think it’s time we took back a healthy regard for selfishness. In fact, I’ll go one better (in for a penny, in for a pound, right?): I think it’s time we made ourselves a priority. To do otherwise is to expect a bountiful yield from a garden we’ve neither planted nor tended. I’m not suggesting we allow ourselves to become egomaniacs, just that we extend the same love and grace to ourselves that we do to others, and to do so first so we have a place from which to love and respect others. That we respect ourselves and allow ourselves the same chance to live our dreams as we allow others. Only when we take back the responsibility to make our own choices—to live on our terms—do we have a place for extraordinary generosity, profound kindness, and the acts of heroism of which we’re capable, and of which others will one day call selfless.
I’m not looking to justify a life of what I would have once called selfishness; I’m looking for a healthy place to put myself in this world. A place to stand. A place from which to love and do what I have been called, by Life, to do. A place to do good, to love boldly and without fear. A place to be generous and hospitable, and to create my art without shame in the days I have allotted to me. A place to become everything I can be, without settling for anything less. A place from which I can find the leverage to make the same things happen in the lives of those I love. Life is too short to do anything else, and too beautiful not to fight hard to be a part of it.
EX NIHILO
There is an old Latin saying that gets thrown around in the theological circles from which I emerged as a young man when I left college: ex nihilo nihil fit. “Out of nothing, nothing comes.” Its use, as far as doctrine goes, is to enforce the idea of a Prime Mover. Nothing comes from nothing, so before there was something, there must have been Something Else to create the something. Or something like that. The years have taken most of the details from the dogma of which I was once fond, and smoothed my edges a little. But the idea remains sound, at least as a metaphor.
I’m listening to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album right now, the cover of which was shot by photographer Jay Maisel. That’s neither here nor there, but the following story is. As the story goes, a student approached Jay and asked him, “How do I make more interesting photographs?” Without pausing, Jay replied, “Become a more interesting person.” Indeed.
We are the source of our own creations, whether that’s a story, a child, a photograph, or a business. That work of art, if it’s to be art at all (and I think all of those can be), will reflect the artist in some fashion. So then the act of creation that is our first concern is ourselves. Before we create art, we must create the artist. I think it’s fair to talk in these terms, forgetting for a moment that on the surface it sounds profoundly narcissistic, because I don’t believe we’re just passive victims of fate. Yes, life happens to us in ways we never expected, and luck, or serendipity, has a way about it that’s hard not to see as wondrous and mysterious (as well as cruel and malign) much of the time. But we live and create in reaction to these events, and it is those reactions over which we have control.
When the potter is given a lump of clay, he creates something of it—either passively, by doing nothing and letting it harden into a useless block, or actively, by putting it on the wheel and shaping it to his desire. We are what we are, flaws and all—and I’ll talk about the power of constraints later—but what we are not is powerless. As our history on this planet too well illustrates, the human will is powerful, and the decision to react to what life brings us is either a creative force or a destructive one in our all-too-short lives. It’s by virtue of the will to react and make choices—even in the light of some very dark, or paralyzing, circumstances—that we create our own lives.
As a photographer, I am a vocal advocate of a very intentional approach to making photographs. There are a lot of decisions that affect the final outcome of the image, and I think abdicating those decisions is a lost opportunity to create something that more clearly expresses ourselves. I believe the same about life.
In fact, I believe this so strongly that I would like to try one more metaphor. As a race we’ve found meaning in stories for millennia. We consume stories at an astonishing rate. What stories we choose to read, watch, or listen to become a part of us. Sadly, because they do give meaning, I suspect many of these stories have become a substitute for living an interesting life. Stripped of all risk, it’s easier to watch great stories than to live them. But choose to live a great story, and we open ourselves to all the possibilities the human drama has always drawn on. Exciting, heady stuff to find the love of your life, but it comes with the risk of heartache and loss. Easier, perhaps, to curl up with whatever movie in which Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan’s characters are falling in love than to do so ourselves. Amazing to jump on a plane to Africa or Southeast Asia for an adventure, but you risk all the uncertainties that have kept thousands from doing the same thing, safe at home on the couch instead with their Lonely Planet book and BBC travel documentaries.
We have the choice to actively write a more interesting story or passively accept the one that comes our way. I’d be contradicting myself to say we ought to choose one over the other. Part of being human is having the dignity to choose. But if our lives are stories then it’s the more interesting one that I’d rather both read and write. And it’s the person living that more interesting story that is going to create the most interesting, meaningful art with their life. That kind of life happens intentionally. We may not choose the things that happen to us—few of us do—but we control our own reactions and, in that way, shape the clay we’ve been given.
So much of our raw material lies outside our grasp. None of us controls what is behind us in our past. We don’t control the parents to whom we were born, or the place or income bracket in which we grew up. We went to this or that school, and by the time we turn 18 we’ve had a childhood of victories and defeats, joys and sorrows, and enough traumas, either real or imagined, to fuel a lifetime of angst-ridden dreams or novels, should we decide to pay it forward and inflict those on future generations. We will, because this is life, continue to collect these experiences. But they are raw materials only, and what we do with them is a part of the choices we make in the creation of ourselves. It’s a collaborative effort with Life, an unpredictable partner to be sure, but it’s our reactions that form the people we become.
To those reactions we add our choices about the stories we listen to, the books we read, the people with whom we surround ourselves, and the jobs in which we choose to remain too long. We choose the ones to whom we give our hearts, our time, our money. We choose to continue learning or not. We choose to buy that new stereo instead of the ticket to Australia for the year in the outback we always wanted. And in so doing, we create the person we become, piece by piece. It’s a good argument for making those decisions with greater care and intention.
If I’ve got a tendency to oversimplify, forgive me; I know life is profoundly complicated at times. But I also know that “it’s complicated” is a poor excuse for resigning ourselves to our fate, as though it’s our lot in life. It would be easy to allow overwhelming debt, bankruptcy, divorce, a diabetes diagnosis, or a near-fatal fall that shatters both your feet, to sideline you. Or me. I’ve lived through all of those, and there have been times I’d have thrown all this right back in the face of anyone who told me excitedly that I was “living a really great story.” But they’d be right all the same, and at the end of it, what have we got but to make the best of it, and write the best damn story we can? Self-pity makes an interesting scene in the movie, especially when it leads to broken furniture, a bar fight, or preferably both—but it gets old fast, and after a few minutes it’s neither a story we want to keep watching, nor one we want to be a part of. The best stories are never the easy ones.
I keep using the word react but it’s only half the story; living in reaction, even mindful reaction, is not living intentionally. Take your favourite story: the hero usually resists the initial call to adventure, or love. Then something comes along to force him into the fray—he reacts and embarks. But at a certain point the story becomes his own, and it is his desire that drives him forward, not just circumstances. He eventually