This is a continuation from the last article Masters of Perception
We Are Building Tomorrow
Take a moment and look around you.
Everything you see, everything that structures your daily life, was created by people who lived before you.
The chair you are sitting in. The building you occupy. The roads you drive on. The systems you depend on. The language you use. The books you have read. The technologies you touch hundreds of times a day.
None of this appeared out of nowhere or by accident.
All of it began as thought, imagination, experimentation, and the determined effort of individuals who were, whether we call them this or not, engaged in acts of creation.
You are living inside the future designed by people from the past.
I have often told people exactly this when they ask what I do all day in the studio.
I tell them, “I am building your future. Somebody has to do it.”
They usually laugh.
But I am completely serious.
Society has a strange habit of misunderstanding the role of artists.
Artists, more properly ‘creatives’, are often treated as though they exist on the edges of civilization, as though art were a luxury, a hobby, a decorative afterthought attached to the serious business of life.
But this could not be further from the truth.
The entire human world is built upon acts of creativity.
Before there was architecture, someone imagined shelter. Before there was writing, someone discovered symbols. Before there were machines, someone imagined movement that did not yet exist. Before there were nations, laws, philosophies, universities, medicine, music, mathematics, and language itself, there was imagination.
Creation always comes first.
Artists, whether painters, writers, musicians, designers, inventors, architects, engineers, filmmakers, poets, or philosophers all participate in this same ancient activity. They shape the world before the world knows what shape it is becoming.
Most people spend their lives adapting themselves to the world they inherit.
Creators spend their lives quietly altering what future generations will inherit.
This is why the creative life matters so profoundly.
The artist is not merely making art. The artist is participating in the ongoing construction of civilization itself.
Even when the work appears small, when recognition never comes, when the work is misunderstood.
The future is always being assembled somewhere.
A child reading a book today may build a different world tomorrow because of something they encountered in your work.
An idea planted now may become visible a hundred years from now.
Most creators underestimate the scale of what they are actually participating in. We imagine we are making objects. In truth, we are participating in the architecture of reality.
Civilization itself is a cumulative work of imagination.
What we call culture is simply creativity made durable across time.
The great mistake is to think that the future is something that happens to us.
The future is being built continuously by those willing to imagine what does not yet exist.
That has always been the work of artists and the creative community.
So, when someone asks what you are doing with your life as an artist, perhaps the simplest answer is the most truthful one.
I am building the future.
Somebody has to do it.
My favorite lines: "You are living inside the future designed by people from the past."
My first glance around was to feel the energy of the vintage 1958 ranch style home that I love which was designed by someone in my past.
And then the modern-day computer I am using which is now 10 years old, but was developed by someone quite some time ago who foresaw what computers would be like in the future. And to think, when I was a little girl and would go to work with my mother and be amazed at the HUGE room of LARGE computers where the room had to be kept frigid.
The other line I like is: "The future is being built continuously by those willing to imagine what does not yet exist."
Whether it is conscious or not, I am inspired all day long wherever I go or am. I have ideas but I also look outside of myself to get/be inspired which often is a reminder to step outside what is known or what is my comfort zone when I observe the outer limits of what is possible. Whether I'm looking at other's art or what has been created before or during my life in everyday things....I'll absorb that Thing, that energy, the way it is made/done and store it for later. It's food for my own creativity but I make the results my own.