Putting the heart, hand and the mind together is difficult for most but natural for the artist. Actually, it’s a must. It keeps their heart beating and their soul panting and thirsting for more. An artist can see the anomaly of a vision in detail, ponder its connection to reality and then put hands to plow and make it so. It’s their core construction to do so. It’s a natural ability to plow through the doldrums of life’s barriers and banalities and create beauty within application. For the rest of us, it makes the world spin delicately and beautifully forward instead of sticking like black, murky mold to the dark, dry walls of mere results and tasks. Their idealism, their pure visioning for better things in a better world actually makes the rest of us see certain things that only the eyes of a child behold.
We live in a world that needs the artist to thrive and believe so the rest can reap the rewards of the imagination and the song of soulful struggle against the dank and heavy drudgery of living. I don’t just mean let the painters paint so we can view “things” in a gallery. Although that is rich and full of breathless endeavors, we need to see the world as our gallery full of breathless endeavors- business, non-profits, churches, school, start-ups, etc. Look at kiva.org, Tom’s Shoes, Semco, William L. Gore, Whole Foods and all the others starting things or building on things that stem from the beauty of the mind and heart with the end game to make this all better. With stories created from the apparent shackles of constraints and restrictions, they thrive in and birth innovations from being able to see around or through impossible places that the rest just see as “stop points.”The artist can rescue through creating dreams and making them real so our soulful struggle keeps spinning positively forward.
Are you “the artist” or the one that waits for “the artist” to create? Do we have to chose or are we all created equal enough to reach deep inside our well and draw out the Picasso that sits and waits for a nudge, a prod of inspiration to then go out and push through the thought of the impossible and produce a gallery for the rest to see?
Leadership and the Art of Surfing 