Love what you love, unapologetically
A lesson I learnt from my 3-year old niece
One of the things I look forward to is video calls with my niece. They don’t follow any set schedule. Sometimes, we talk a couple of times a week. Other times, weeks can go by without a call. She’s in Boston, US; I’m in New Delhi, India. Our video calls tether us to one another’s lives and loves.
Well, her loves.
She’s 3 years old. So of course we focus on what she wants to share, or see {almost always, she wants to meet my 2 fur babies, Simba and Loki}. And we paint.
Some days, I watch while she paints. Her whole body thrown into the act. Her fingers dipped in paint. Her brush moving energetically across the page. Sometimes she’ll ask me how to mix a color, but mostly, she just does her own thing.
Sometimes, we paint together. And a lot of times, she asks me if I’ll paint. These sessions are always, always fun. She’ll tell me what colors to use. Which brushes to use. Watch intently while I do my thing.
Until a few months ago, she loved all the colors. Our paintings used to be a riot of blues and oranges, yellows and pink, bold reds and browns.
These days, she’s in her season of pink. That’s the only color she wants me to use — light pink, bright pink, very bright pink, brownish pink, reddish pink. She’ll occasionally ask for a bit of orange or gold, but it’s mostly all pink.
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I try and steer her to different colors, to entice her with my colorful tubes of paint. But she remains steadfast in her choices: pink in all its glory.
Oh, and butterflies. She’s in love with them. She wants them on everything. And they have to be pink. I tried stamping one with a pink and purple stamp pad. That was a no. She wanted the next butterfly to be only pink please, thank you.
So that is what we do. Our paintings these days are a riot of pink. And butterflies.
She doesn’t care about contrast, variety, or breaking up the monotony of pink.
She knows what she loves and she goes for it, unapologetically.
There’s a lesson there for us, isn’t there? I mean, I don’t know about you, but there are times when I wonder if its ok to love what I love, especially when it’s somewhat against the grain.
Like loving my hermit life
Or considering an early retirement
Or watching one episode of a Netflix series with a cup of coffee and a light snack as an evening ritual to switch off of work
With that last one, especially. It brings to mind unflattering images of laziness and sloth, though it is roughly 45 minutes spent drinking coffee and watching a Netflix show.
And yet, I plague myself with questions:
Why am I watching Netflix in the evening? Maybe I should be journaling or doing something more productive instead?
Am I even allowed to call watching Netflix a ritual? Using it as a marker to move from the 9to5 into my role as an artist and writer?
ButAndAlso. There’s no rule that says you can only watch Netflix at night, after dinner. And there’s no ritual police to monitor what you choose to call a ritual. And there’s absolutely no reason to look outside of yourself for the answer to any of those questions.
As long as it makes you happy, that’s all that should matter, right?
But it often isn’t.
We get so caught up in the “right way” to do things, in the idea of how a ritual should look, for example, that we second guess the things we love...the things that bring us joy.
Often, we do this in our creative practice too.
Is it ok to default to a color pallet I love?
Is it ok to make scribbles and marks on a page and call it art?
Is it ok to explore the same subject, the same style, over and over again?
The answer to all of those questions — and more — is unequivocally yes, yes, and hell yes!
Do what you love, unapologetically. Love what you love, unapologetically.
Do it often enough, and your work will evolve and grow. It’s inevitable.
I’ve seen it in the work of almost every artist and creative I’ve come across, the changes and the deepening and the ripening of their creative expression.
And it all comes from loving what you love, unapologetically.
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Love this permission slip! My inner kid likes what it likes and sometimes I need to remember that is more than ok. Let her have her way. ❤️
"Our paintings these days are a riot of pink." 💗 Love the lesson in here too—when did we learn to put what we love through so many filters?