Finding our Arc

I recently did an interview with a publication where I was asked the question of how I moved from artwork to writing, something the interviewer viewed as two distinct areas.  I laughed and said, “Let me make it even more confusing, I came out of a career in finance and was in social work before that.”  

Artwork to writing seemed like one of the smaller steps I've made in my lifetime. They are two different art forms for telling stories and that is what I do.  Now I realize that words and images are supposed to draw on opposite sides of our brain and often represent two different types of people. I’m convinced I hopscotch back and forth across my brain with some regularity. An integrated brain often seems to go with being left-handed so perhaps being a lefty in a right-handed world is a factor. I proceeded to share with him my theory that everything I’ve been drawn to has revolved around solving puzzles and telling stories.

His question made me realize that we meet people at one point in time along their personal story arc. We may know two data points about them that we focus upon and that becomes the context in which we view them while in fact the context is much broader.  I find that happens often now that I am meeting people after their career has concluded and their kids are grown. I forget that they had a life before that moment. I suppose that is the function of interviewers, to broaden the context. We also are our own editors.  I could have decided to stay within the context he knew and not painted the broader picture, excising that incongruent part of my history. 

We each have a story arc, one we ourselves are not yet aware of in its totality. Had you spoken to me at an earlier point in my life, I would not have been able to tell you what my latest iteration would have looked like. It has certainly not been linear, although I would argue that there is an internal logic. I’ve often thought of my life like a book, one I wanted to peek ahead in, a bad habit of mine.  In my younger days, I used to go to a psychic who gave me glimpses into my possibilities. It was my version of peeking ahead. “Tell me it will all be OK," I was really asking.  Then I decided to just live my life and see where it took me and where I took it.  It is a bit of a collaboration between us and the universe. We can drive it to some extent, but opportunities and challenges present themselves to which we have to respond. How we respond can take us in very different directions.

Over time we develop an approach to life events. When I was in college I used to debate with my roommate which one of us was the luckiest person.  We each believed that good things came to us and that we had some ability to influence those things. I’m not sure where that belief came from at that early age.  To some extent it is magical thinking, but it also means that when you expect good things, you typically get them and it becomes a reinforcing philosophy.  When I reconnected with my old roommate several decades later we found that we were both living engaged and interesting lives. I suspect the optimism we shared had a lot to do with the outcome. Have you ever noticed how two people can have similar experiences and interpret them in totally different ways? Half-full or half-empty?  I think those of us who see the glass as half-full are looking at a broader story arc. 

 I’ve often described myself as a short-run pessimist and a long-run optimist.  In the short-run anything can go wrong, but in the long-run it all sorts out. I’m willing to acknowledge that there are times that life can be pretty miserable, but over time I believe it arcs to self-awareness and gratitude for what we are given.  We begin to find the pattern of our life, to see the logic underlying how we live and to appreciate the many gifts that we receive along the way.

The Collector

I am a collector. Doesn't that sound more elegant than a pack rat, connoting white gloves rather than beady eyes? I collect information, especially markers of my history, preserving the traces of where I have been, to fortify myself for the future. I know people who keep very little, curating their lives to only the precious items they deem worthy.  I envy them their lack of clutter, the clarity with which they go through life unbound by their past. Perhaps they are more prescient than I am and know what will matter to them in the future, or perhaps it just doesn't matter to them.  I will never be one of them. 

I come by this collecting trait naturally.  If there is a gene for it, I got it from my father. When I look at my growing piles of papers, I have visions of my father’s study. There I sorted through piles of paper after his death, unable to move beyond his rocker, where I nested, in a room filled with books and music and history, layered with unopened mail he could no longer manage and New York Times clippings that he clung to. My mother urged him to get rid of the clippings, stacked in piles reaching upward.   “I need them to help me remember,”  he snapped. I was struck by his response.  I understood his desire to capture what spoke to him, an accumulation of readings that captured his window on the world and documented his essence.  It is not too unlike my old books still populating my shelves. They remind me of the path I took to becoming me.


My father papered his existence, a box of his history, carefully organized, awaited me amidst the chaos. He tried in vain to make order out of chaos with inventories of records and videotapes, a carryover from his days of collecting stamps, meticulously recording them in his tiny script. He cherished his history, where he came from on his path to becoming who he was.

I am made of the same cloth, a historian in my soul.  I  read his New York Times clippings looking for a way into his being, now non-being, in a silent conversation post-death.  I looked at these manifestations of what he was drawn to, trying to find the person I never really knew. There is something about history that fascinates me, the residue of a person’s life, like a trail of breadcrumbs into their being.  It is an effort to make sense of the world, to find an understanding and mastery of it, to understand another being and perhaps even oneself.

It occurs to me that this tendency perhaps explains my email box.  It has an embarrassing number of emails. Every so often I decide to tackle it and delete large swaths of emails, but it is so out of control that it makes only the slightest dent. Instead it functions as a storage dump, a filing cabinet through which I search as necessary.  Recently I had a brainstorm.  I would go back to 2010 and work forward, Then I should be able to quickly delete virtually everything as it would all be out of date. Instead, I discovered a treasure trove of history.

Turns out 2010 was an important year in my life.  There I found an email that reported on the interview project which led to the book I will publish this month. I wrote the email on the day I first voiced the idea of interviewing elders and even proposed the idea of a book linking artwork and story.  Seven and a half years later, I have done everything I envisioned so long ago.

In 2010, I met my friend Dora, a Holocaust survivor from my ancestral town. In another email, I wrote of my first five-hour visit with her, saying I thought that we would be great friends. Now in her nineties, she has become a pivotal person in my life.

The year 2010 laid the groundwork for two international shows also well documented in emails. Upon my return the prior year from Lithuania, I had done a series of artwork on how Lithuania dealt with the Holocaust. I had been invited to show the work in London. And in 2010 I was invited to show my work in Poland where I collaborated with my new friend Dora, showing her photographs with my paintings, traveling through time, a hole in time, as I named the series on the Jewish community of my ancestral town.

I realized that I was looking at the early part of a seven-year span, the beginning of many of the efforts that unfolded within that period. Seven years is a period that is often viewed as significant in religion and in spirituality.  I began to read about seven-year cycles, suddenly realizing that I am now at the beginning of a new one. Some posit that we live our life in such cycles, each with its distinct characteristics, reflective of our personal growth and the demands of each period of our life. If that is the case, 2009 began such a cycle and by 2010 a great deal had begun to happen.  It is a cycle described as a turning point guided by intuition and a desire to apply one's talents to something beyond one's personal self-interest, a greater sense of purpose. The psychiatrist Carl Jung viewed it through the lens of individuation,  a time when we realize that who we are grows out of the collective experience of our family and culture.   We begin to explore these questions freeing us to redefine ourselves and create something new.  That was eerily accurate, my book explores the collective experience of the Jewish community as I explored how I fit within it.   

As I leave that stage, the future is about harvesting, teaching and sharing the results of those efforts.  Now that is something to which I look forward.