“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

-Pablo Picasso

Think back to the first moment you can remember being proud. All the way back. Back to th earliest childhood memory that exists in your mind where you felt proud. Were you holding up a picture drawn in kindergarten? Or getting out of a pool after a race? Or crawling into our moms bed with a warm cup of cocoa? Now, think of a time where that pride was not greeted by your desired response. Were you crushed? Imagine the picture you crafted with your young baby hands that was greeted with a “Nice honey, go show dad,” who then responded “Mhmm very nice” while you sulked away and gave up drawing. Or, where you won your swim race, which was expected, and so a few high-fives later was then forgotten. Or where the cocoa you made for your mom was put on the side table a left to turn cold.

Think back to those first moments of pride. What were they before you showed anyone else? What felt good before the world taught you that it wasn’t?

I dare you to reconnect with those moments and to give them the validity your parents couldn’t at the time. The validation that your classmates and lovers and friends could not give. I dare you to give it to yourself. And then, I challenge you to pursue it as if your life depends on it. To swap an hour of the time you spend on social media… scrolling through Instagram, or Facebook, or twitter, or youtube… to give to your art each day. Whether it is cooking up the dinner of your dreams, or cleaning houses, or painting pictures, or walking in the woods… I challenge you to connect back to the things that your 5 year-old self was proud of. And then to do them.

Because here’s the thing. The big secret that no one tells us. You are still the five year old. You are the child who is proud of their picture, and hot cocoa, and how clean your room is. There is nothing wrong with taking pride in the things that make you happy. Thats all of it. We have come to a point in our individualization. In our freedom. In our time. In our society…. where the things that we think are important are inextricably linked to the importance of the whole (which is why capitalism exists and favors certain trends over the other… but thats not the point this time) and it is our job as humans to find out what our job is as an individual that contributes to the collective whole. This means finding the things we enjoy doing and doing them for the sake of doing them. Our joy trickles out, and we expand the universe.

We throw a lot of chaos into the mixture. There is pressure to make MORE money, do MORE things, meet MORE people, eat MORE food, eat MORE of the right foods, walk MORE, exercise MORE, be MORE than we already are. We don’t need more. We have enough. We are enough. There is still the exact same amount of happiness available in the joy we find in the simple things.

We have the potential to be the simplicity of a five year old.

And yet we also have the capacity to experience the same depth of complexity of the five-year-old’s ability to feel emotion with presence and unwavering clarity in the moment that they are in. The answer to the world’s problems lives in the hearts of the five-year-old’s who are experiencing it for the first time. Adult’s simply have a harder time finding it, and have far too many voices telling them that their joy is not justified. I am here to tell you that it is.

Love what you love and fuck the haters. Einstein once said “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” And I’m starting to think that we are spending way too much time creating things that can’t e explained to a six-year old. I am tired of trying to rationalize the insanity of the capitalist, corporate world we live in to the five year old’s who find genuine happiness in the way their crayons left color on a page. It’s time to pick up our crayons and join them.

Art is not reserved for the artists. Art is the way in which people choose to express their truth unabashedly so that they may learn from the world how their thoughts are being received by it. The artists are the ones who design cities, who design companies, who design stock markets, who design the patterns that hold our worlds together… and it is time for people to claim their work as art. Its time to make this world art.

Maybe, just maybe, if we incorporate beauty into our goals, we will find a world where the beauty of our projects holds as much value as it’s ability to make money. And maybe, when we prioritize beauty above money, we will find ways for beauty to incorporate itself into the fabric of our existence. Then, maybe, when the fabric of this world that we are creating shines with the beauty that we refuse to sacrifice, we will learn how to share our truest selves with each other and be seen exactly as we are and can start there.