Wistful for the Creative Life

This morn­ing I did a lit­tle surf­ing in the blo­gop­shere within the imme­di­ate vicin­ity of [Arlo](http://www.jenville.com/arlo_frameset.html). He is sur­rounded by cre­ative, fun, prob­a­bly some­what unsta­ble, yet awe­some peo­ple. As one per­son said, Arlo’s life will def­i­nitely not suck.

It made me think of the path not trav­eled in my life. As I get fur­ther in time (and space, as it turns out) from my col­lege career, it becomes clearer to me that there was a Turn­ing Point back then. The choice I made set me on a path very dif­fer­ent from what the other choice would have done.

My fresh­man year at Brown, I took an intro­duc­tory art class. Why? Because I’d taken art all through high school. Because peo­ple told me I was good at it. Because I liked draw­ing and stuff. My teacher… what was her name? James had a good nick­name for her, too. I want to say Marla, but I’m sure that’s not it. Any­way, at the end of the class, which was sort of a technique-survey class (one week with char­coal, one week with col­lage, one week with water­color, etc.), Marla asked me to choose art as my major. I think I was flattered–though clearly not enough–but I said no, thanks. I was going into biol­ogy, or envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies, or whatnot.

And that, as they say, was that.

It took me seven years to get back into doing any kind of cre­ative work, and even then, it was mak­ing newslet­ters with a com­puter. As I worked, at var­i­ous jobs in var­i­ous states, I grad­u­ally did more cre­ative stuff, on the web, a lit­tle in print. My cre­ativ­ity found an out­let in free­lance web design, on my own sites, in our life a lit­tle. And I was fine with that. Then a cou­ple of years ago (three years now?) I took an oil paint­ing class at Iowa. And I loved it. I flat-out freakin loved it. I loved being cre­ative, I loved oil paint­ing (which I had never tried before), but mostly, I loved hav­ing the time set aside to ded­i­cate to being creative.

In the work I do now, I try very hard to be cre­ative. And my employer, earn­ing my undy­ing grat­i­tude, have seen fit to let me expand my job duties such that I can make things: signs, posters, cre­ative stuff. My life is very busy now, with Aidan and… well, with Aidan. It is just not easy to find the time to do non-critical things, and when I do, there are so many of them that they crowd each other out and leave me feel­ing spent, with noth­ing to show.

It’s life. And don’t get me wrong, I am not unhappy.

But read­ing about Arlo, and immers­ing myself a lit­tle in his life, I find myself feel­ing a lit­tle wist­ful. I won­der, from my cur­rent path, where I would be had I made the other deci­sion back in 1989. Brown is cheek to jowl with RISD, one of the pre­mier art and design schools in the coun­try, and I could have taken classes there, even trans­ferred. My sis­ter was liv­ing in NYC, and I prob­a­bly would have moved there after col­lege regard­less of my major, but as an art stu­dent, I would have explored/seen/enjoyed a whole dif­fer­ent world in the City. I might find myself in Arlo’s cir­cle, or in a sim­i­lar one. As it was, as an envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies major, I was just bid­ing my time until some­thing drew me away.

And some­thing did, and it was mar­velous. Love, fam­ily, Aidan. The other path might not have given me any of those things, and so I would never trade for it. Despite the entirety of this post, I have never regret­ted my life, and I still do not. I do, in fact, love my life.

But I find myself won­der­ing if I couldn’t strad­dle some space between these two paths. I’ll have to think on that. You know, when I have time.