You Can’t Expedite An Artful Life

When I think about what I want, knowing it isn’t selfish to want things, not even a shred of me says wealth in money or in a charming career — though I hope to always steward our work and our finances well. That’s not me being low maintenance and modest. What I want is experience and memory and all the art in the world. I want to be good and wise and know a lot. To have in my arsenal an elderly appreciation of life before really getting old. Maybe that’s my age talking. I don’t want to be perfect as long as it’s still unreachable, but I want to pen ten million words and I want to have been alive enough to say that I’ve seen the same classic film for three decades, each adaptation somehow worse than the original.

But I am just barely twenty-six. I have not yet enjoyed the feast of my thirties, forties, fifties, and on. I don’t concede to the idea that we ought to hurry our lives up to “get to the good parts,” but if there was available to us a way to expedite firm knowledge, a clear grasp, a higher understanding, a keen sense of judgement, wouldn’t you take it? A mentor once said, unlucky for me, something like only failure and small pieces of regret beget the warm fire of wisdom.

If you’re unlike me, perhaps you’re out there, senses engaged, living a full life unbothered. But if this rings true for you, too, perhaps you’re needing the same reminder that the speedy road to sanctification does not respond timely to want. In a month whirling with goals, intentions, and many, many wants which are not bad, don’t be afraid to break it back down into bites that suit your size. Rather than the complete mastery of life, what about the rich seeds of discipline?

Ask someone wiser than you how to do it, do it miserably wrong, and let the coldness of that inch you closer. Toward mercy, perspective, revelation, ten million words. And on that day which you swore’d never come, you’ll wring your hands at the warm fire of wisdom and let some twenty-six-year-old beneath you catch a flash. You’ll tell them to enjoy being made and that, indeed, one of the greatest disadvantages of hurry is that it takes way too long (G.K. Chesterton). And that after all this time it was just a deeper union with God you were after, which come to find out is better than all the art in the world.