Done with improvement

A few years ago I joined a kids’ art class.

“Like in ‘Elf?’ My friend Larry asked me when I told him. He was picturing giant me squeezed into a tiny desk among four- and five-year-olds, eagerly anticipating an afternoon of finger painting or crayon breaking.

That would have been high-larious (and I wouldn’t put it past me), but not quite. The class was for older kids, 10 and up, and the teacher let the occasional grownup join.

I was thrilled. All the local adult classes I’d tried up to that point had been boring as hell. I’d gone in picturing the group sitting behind easels, each rendering a still life or a model or something from our minds, while the teacher glided peaceably about the room giving the occasional compliment or suggestion. I took class after class and never found that. No matter the teacher, the school, the medium, it was all about technique: how to achieve this effect or that. Pressing the charcoal or brush into the page using different pressure. Making little cubes and orbs with varying light sources and correspondingly-angled shadows. Practicing the fundamentals to apply, I hoped, to freer projects that would come later on. But no. I came home with pads and notebooks filled with gestures, with attempts, with smudges and squiggles. Not one finished product. Not one “I attempted this, it’s imperfect but it’s a thing.”  

Of course, this isn’t inherently wrong. It’s how one begins a serious education in anything: by drilling the essential elements. The thing is that these classes were one-offs, not part of any degree program; still, every single one was still oriented this way. It made sense. I live in a Very Serious university town where everyone—especially the university students—are concerned with doing something Very Serious with their lives. Everyone, it seemed, was on a trajectory, seeking improvement.

Not me.

I just wanted to play.

So I was over the moon when Dan said I could join the handful of kids in his little garage studio on Sunday mornings. I filed into the backyard alongside the youngins and set myself up at our shared table, relieved that my knees fit under it tidily and I wasn’t towering over my classmates. I got out the supplies I’d been told to bring and geared myself up for whatever we’d be working on that day.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised—the youth of Berkeley are, after all, the future Very Serious, Very Important People of the world. Their extracurriculars were never going to entail a Sunday morning spent joyfully expressing themselves in community.  

Nossir. We were there to learn technique. To be diligent. To improve.

I was crestfallen, but in my characteristic optimism (naïveté?) I hung in for a few sessions, holding out hope that Dan’s painstaking lessons on rendering a perfectly proportioned profile of a human face would eventually evolve (devolve?) into him leaving us alone to draw our own creatures or self-portraits. To work quietly or chattily alongside each other as we freely interpreted the assignment.

There was a touch of this, to be fair. At some point in each class (never soon enough) Dan shut up and made the rounds of the room as we worked. He wasn’t ungenerous with praise, especially with kids who ran in particularly original directions. He held their pieces up, inviting the rest of us to explore the edges of possibility in our own work—BUT not before pointing out just how “right” that kid had gotten the proportions of the goddamn face in the scene.

Then there were Dan’s group emails to the parents (and me): The kids will improve if they attend regularly. They’ll improve if they practice at home. The only way they’ll improve is … “ In fact in all the Very Serious art classes I’ve taken I’d actually never heard a teacher use the word “improve” so much.

Gahhhhh. There was no escaping this.

I haven’t been to another art class since.

The self-repair project

This comes to mind, I think, because I’ve been reflecting on the world of improvement I’ve lived in for decades. It’s the air we breathe in this world, of course, but I’ve also voluntarily thrown myself into it hard, in the form of “self-development.” I’ve committed to regular practices, to endless excavation, to surfacing shadow, to re-wiring patterns, to hanging in, to working through. To endless, merciless self-assessment of my ‘progress.’ (The ironic metric: how much closer am I to my own authenticity?)

It's had its benefits, absolutely. I wouldn’t be where or who I am without it. And. I am freaking exhausted. Because, I realize, I haven’t been doing all this out of some joyful desire to live into my full human potential and help others do the same. Sure, I’ve said that’s what it was, but really I’ve been motivated by a drive to fix myself—by a sense that something in me is inherently broken, needing to be solved.

Having found the source of this (which, don’t worry, I’m writing an entire book about) has helped me to see the spirit with which I have engaged in all of this work… and it has been work. Labor. Toil. Largely joyless—ironic, since that’s precisely what I set out to find.

It makes me wonder how many of us are unnecessarily wearing ourselves out in the name of improvement because we feel we’re somehow in need of repair. I mean, if a ten-year-old can’t sit in an art class without an adult urging them to get better, where are we free from this? 

Personally, I feel a bone-deep done-ness with trying to improve. I need spaces where I can just exist, just play. And it was very cool to realize that I appear to have created one. In Soul Writing groups we are in a sense all painting the same still life (the writing prompt) and then walking around to each other’s easels, squealing over the various interpretations of it. There is zero focus on improvement—which, not surprisingly, is why it happens. It’s the process, the practice, that makes us braver, makes our voices richer. We experiment, try new things. We aren’t afraid to fail because there is no such thing. There is no trajectory at all.

I take a fuller breath than I have in some time. My friends and me, kids in the sandbox again. Nothing to prove, and certainly not to improve. We are here, simply, to delight.