“Pursuit of Happiness” 18 x 18

I believe everyone should run, play games, sing, dance, tell stories, and make poems and create all kinds of amazing objects out of clay and paint and whatever they can find. I believe that we should honor and celebrate those who are especially good at these kinds of things. But we should never discourage those who are more enthusiastic than expert, more passionate than talented, more eager than educated. We reach our full potential not through criticism, but through the sheer pleasure of doing a thing increasingly well.

We have become a nation of spectators and that breaks my heart. Creativity, imagination, and physical exuberance are essential human characteristics and we deprive ourselves of our very humanity whenever we shut these qualities away, experiencing them only second-hand as we watch players on a field, actors on a screen, dancers on a stage, or listen to musicians and singers or read books or gaze at works of art.

So who cares if your paintings are not museum quality? Who cares if you’re not the best player on the court or the best singer in the choir? Who cares if your stories make the bestseller lists or not? Just go out there and enjoy the fullness of your humanity. Critics be damned.