Let Children Be Children

If this is my calling, so be it. If it’s simply something I like or love to do, again, so be it. And yet, at the beginning of my Perspective statement, which was written a dozen or so years later, and has remained unchanged to this day, I say,

Each word I write and line I draw is an artist’s statement — not because I am an artist, but because life itself, in every moment and every fiber, is the art I am called to practice and to live.

So it would seem that my real calling is “life itself.” What else could it be? And if living is an art, as I and a great many others have suggested, it follows that we might expect to pass through some kind of apprenticeship, in which our confusion and clumsiness are readily apparent, clouding our view, sometimes even to the point that our actions are self-defeating, and often self-destructive. It’s more than just growing up, and becoming a so-called functioning adult. The world is full of functioning adults, and the result of that mass-functioning is painfully apparent. Millions of us practice not the art of living, but, rather, engage in self-sabotage our whole lives long. And we cling to that suffering image as if it were a form of nobility. It’s as if we’re passing the precious days of our lives within the confines of a bad dream, while at the same time sharing that dream — because it’s so easy to attract and find sympathetic fellow-sufferers. That there is beauty even in this, and that we are able to make something beautiful of it, goes to prove that life really is the one true calling.

Let children be children, I say. And let those of us who have served our apprenticeship, be children too.

[ 1982 ]