Earlier this week, I received a DM from someone asking me (with genuine curiosity) why I talk about artistry the same way I talk about life. It’s a good question, because they are not the same thing at all. In fact, one is a part of our experience, and the other is all of our perceivable experience. But still, I view most things through the lens of creativity, as the process for creation seems to mimic much of life’s natural processes. I had to start thinking.

It is not simply because I have chosen to pursue a creative life that I have found it embedded in my world in any meaningful or significant way. Instead, it is because there are clear parallels (to me) that highlight how we engage with the world and how we feed into our crafts, whatever they may be.

It is the hallmark of craftsmanship to engage with one of two things, usually if not always at the same time: to make or to change.

To make, to have made, to change, to have changed. It is the process of making something, an idea, from perceivably nothing that makes artistry so impressive, right? When we go to our favourite craftspeople, whether that be chefs, musicians, artists, or anyone in the habit or vocation of invention, we are incredibly inspired by the origin. The idea of another’s epiphany brought to life is a wonderful thing to witness.

But it is not from nothing, though the idea may seem to form from an imaginary, incomprehensible location. We live in a material universe, and the things we make are simply things that have been changed by our hands.

We do not make work appear, create our projects from the ether or derive material from the depths of dark matter. We manipulate, sculpt and play a role in the invention of things. We alchemize, we transform.

So when you ask me about life, I can only imagine life through these two things: first, the inspiration that appears from the depths of our own psyche, that is, our individual psychology and imagination, and second, the transformation of our circumstances, feelings, environments, etc., into something else, something more meaningful or simply different.

The world around us becomes the water to our rock, which has eroded. We become creative in our responses, and we imagine possibilities. Our minds become the hand which brings a stringed guitar to its use. We turn silence into noise by transforming the shape of sound through our own will.

In short, we do not live without relation. It all comes down to this.

Because we cannot do much else besides work from nothing or everything, I find myself a craftsperson in my life, handed materials that demand my attention for inspiration, and which I will use to move me through today, tomorrow, and so on. If I weren’t a painter, I would still practice the craft of living, which requires both imagination and resourcefulness.

Even death is an act of transformation, where our sentience has given us the chance to invent heavens or other possibilities and where the very act of our dying becomes an artistic one, a drama and alchemical process to become a different type of organic matter. Nothing we do exists in isolation.

As we encounter the world and as it encounters us, there is no simple, unexplainable thing that makes the world go round. Instead, it is the choices we make from the circumstances we’re granted that define living as a creative process.

The greatest project we have is an existential and exhaustive articulation of the creator archetype, and that is simply living.

I make because I choose, I change because I exist. Is this not life in creative terms? Are we not here because of the nature of change and the drive to make something, across millennia? Not necessarily one maker, but billions of them.

Perhaps the very root of life is this call to transform, to play a hand, to join the chorus. Perhaps the root of life is to make, to change.

Try fitting all of that into a DM.