Untitled. Gouache and colored pencil on tinted paper (detail.)

2016.  A banner year.  Not “it will be a banner year.”  It is.  17 hours into it and I have decided.  And there are no wrong decisions.

Contemporary philosopher Alan Watts gets credit for the “there are no bad decisions” line.  “Worriers are people who think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen,” he says.  “Choice is the act of hesitation … before making a decision.  It is a mental wobbling.”

When you know this, there is no fear.  No hesitation.  No “mental wobbling.”  Life becomes a seamless flow.  I’m not much of a skier but it seems to me it is like a schuss down an infinite hill for which you have, as the kids say, “mad skills,” skills so mad that you needn’t mentally plan your route, where you will turn, how you will avoid the trees, what vistas you will stop to appreciate.  You are confident that you can’t make a wrong turn (or to put it more positively, you will make all the right turns) because you are letting your intuition, which KNOWS much more – so much more – than your “mighty” intelligence, have the reins, or the poles.

I’ve been doing this lately: practicing on things that clearly don’t matter in a big way but that I have spent far too much of my life stressing over.  What movie to watch, which book to buy (easy – all of them), what to write about in a blog post.  These, and countless more, are choices around which I’ve spent possibly and literally years getting my knickers in a knot.  It’s an exercise in freedom to make a decision without a second thought.  That doesn’t make it a random decision, like pulling a name out of a hat (though for lots of dilemmas, that would work as well as anything) but one that’s guided by some hard-won mad skills in the life department.  You might consider a decision made this way random, not based on “the facts,” but the end result is the same: a perfectly acceptable choice AND no stress.

I’ve also exercised this new approach in my studio.  What mark to make, what color to use, even “what shall I play on today?”  It really doesn’t matter, as long as I show up.

The moral of the story is this: “Show up for life.”  2016 is a banner year and the banner says, “Get on the playing field.  Pick up the brush or the camera or the pen.  Ski down that hill.”