The Artisan Soul (8 page)

So after she finished her beautiful piece, not wanting in any way to discourage her authentic expression of her story, I asked her, “Mariah, we've always loved you. It seems like you have had a really beautiful life. Where did that come from? There's so much pain in that song.”

She smiled from ear to ear, beaming as she always does. She said, “Oh, I'm not writing for myself. I'm writing for the pain of others.”

It struck me that this, too, is part of the artistic journey. The role of the artist is partly to interpret the human story. They in a sense write for all of us. That's why millions of teenage girls buy music by Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, and Adele. They are writing for all teenage girls.

A significant part of the artistic challenge is to go beyond interpreting human experience to be an interpreter of human possibility. It is so much easier to create an authentic work of art informed by despair, so much more difficult to create a true masterpiece informed by optimism and hope. Yet these are the most compelling people—the ones who have overcome tragedy and found beauty; the ones who should have drowned in despair but found hope; the ones who should have forever remained trapped in this rubble of their failures and yet found courage and resolve to rise from the dead.

In life I have found two kinds of people to be the most uninteresting. (Is it okay to admit that there are people who are uninteresting?) The first is the person who has never suffered. It is still surprising to me, but I have met people who told me that they have never suffered, they have never failed; they have lived a life absolutely devoid of pain and disappointment. Living as long as I have, I have discovered that people who live these Teflon lives have only managed that outcome by living a life without risk, courage, passion, or love. We cannot love deeply or risk greatly and never know failure or disappointment. Not even God was able to pull that one off. Love never comes without wounds; faith never comes without failure.

But there is another kind of uninteresting person. It is the person who has suffered, and that suffering is all they know. They are trapped in their pain; they wallow in their despair; they are all wounds and no scars. All they can talk about is their pain. Life is suffering, and the suffering does not make them empathetic. They have no room for the pain of others. Their pain fills their entire universe. They are not interested in your story; they are not interested in your wounds; they are not interested in your pain. They are interested in you only if you are interested in them. They become emotional transients, nomadic wanderers moving from one person to another as each person unwittingly feeds their self-absorption, at first not realizing they do not want to find a way through their pain but only to trap others in their own endless suffering. As uninteresting as the person who has never suffered may be, this person wins the prize. It's hard to tell a great story if we remain stuck in chapter one.

Beyond despair there must always be hope; beyond betrayal there must be a story of forgiveness; beyond failure there must be a story of resilience. If the story ended at the cross, it might be a story worth telling, but that story could never give life. Only the Resurrection makes the Crucifixion what it is for all of us who are marked by the cross.

The life of Jesus should be a compelling narrative to everyone who longs to live the life of a true artisan. Choosing to live simply, he lived humanity's most profound life. Two thousand years later, the life of Jesus remains the world's most powerful message and metaphor. He was both interpreter of God and interpreter of man. Through his life, we have come to understand who God is as well as who we were always intended to be. The last hours of his life have become known around the world as the Passion, which is a beautiful reminder to us all that receiving finds its beauty only when there is meaning and intention. To those who watched his life, he said simply, “If you really know me, you will know my Father as well” (John 14:7). For those of us who have been changed by his life, we understand that in him we find the promise of who we can become.

In the same way, each of us is a translator of life. Our lives are to be an interpretation of our experience with God and an expression of what it means to be fully human. This is no small challenge. We live in the crucible between the promise of who we can become and the reality of who we have been. We exist between tragedy and triumph, failure and success, life and death, hate and love, and this in-between can be like an abyss where we feel lost and torn. It is here, though, in this tension that we find the most interesting people. These are not the watchers who never risk stepping outside the confines of their own safety to experience life at its fullest, nor are they wallowers trapped in a quagmire of suffering. Instead they are artisans who refuse to embrace life as anything less than the greatest work of art.

I have worked with interpreters before. It is an interesting experience to speak in English and hear your words immediately translated into German or Korean or Japanese. It's hard to explain, but even when you don't understand a language, you have a keen sense of whether the translator is expressing your thoughts accurately and authentically.

I remember in Germany once stopping the interpreter in the middle of my talk and challenging him in front of the thousands in the audience. I was certain that he not only had not translated what I said but had in fact reinterpreted my words and said quite the opposite. So I stopped, stepped into this uncomfortable moment, and asked him a simple question. It was really more of a statement. “You didn't say what I said, did you? In fact, you said the opposite of what I said. You just said what you thought I should say, but not what I did say.”

After a long pause, he acknowledged that I was exactly right. Afterward, he asked me onstage, “How did you know that?”

I'm not completely sure how I knew. But I do know that I have a pretty good sense of how an audience will respond when a certain statement is made. The statement I made was somewhat controversial. The response of the audience was immediate and willing adherence. I knew that thousands of Germans would not respond in such a positive way to what I had just said. Interpretation is far more than language; interpretation goes to essence. Interpretation is the translation of the soul.

Have you ever met someone who told you everything that was true about God but did not resonate with the essence of God? It's no small thing to hear that God is love, but hearing that truth is not nearly as powerful as experiencing that love from another human being. When truth is used as a tool for condemnation and judgment, it's hard to understand the words of Jesus: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). Remember, the artisan soul finds truth in essence, not in information. It is who we are that is the material for our greatest work of art. From that essence we begin to discover our own voice, and that inner voice is the declaration of our authentic story.

In finding our voice, we must pay careful attention to the interpretation of the story we are in. As storytellers, we find meaning in all of life's experiences and also bring meaning to the lives of others. Our great fear is that we will never live a life worth sharing with others, never live a story worth telling, but that we will find ourselves trapped in a story for which there is no ending, only an endless cycle of disappointment and defeat. The lie that paralyzes us is that those failures and disappointments disqualify us from living out the great story of our lives. The reality is that our struggles and suffering give us the context to tell the greatest story of our lives. To do this, though, we must discover the unique characteristics that distinguish those individuals who have known both tragedy and triumph, who have found the dancing after the mourning, and who have learned to count it all joy when they faced trials of many kinds.

Years ago I had the privilege of hearing Daniel Kahneman while participating in a community known as TED, for technology, entertainment, and design. He is widely regarded as the world's most influential living psychologist, and he won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on economic behavior. In one presentation, he talked about how we are all essentially two selves—our experienced self and our remembered self—and how in essence we do not choose between experiences, but rather between memories of experiences. According to Kahneman, even when we think about the future, we think of our future not as experiences but as anticipated memories.

What struck me in his observation of our two selves is the idea that our personal happiness is rooted not in our experienced self but in our remembered self. In fact, in some strange way our experiences have a minimal effect on our personal happiness. This is not to say that we do not have painful experiences that bring us great sorrow. But in the end our experiences are not the dominant force affecting our personal happiness. It is instead our remembered self that controls how we perceive and experience life.

You and I have both met people who have gone through real pain and suffering in their lives that they struggled to get past. I know in my life I have met many such people. I find it difficult to see how they could overcome such tragedy. Sometimes life comes with such blunt force trauma that the natural and human response is to curl up in a fetal position and hope that somehow the world will just go away. Yet inevitably we soon meet someone else who has suffered just as deeply and yet that person has somehow risen above their pain. They remember the pain but are no longer trapped in it. Occasionally we have the privilege of meeting that rare individual whose story is filled with such overwhelming tragedy that we wonder how in the world they can see so much beauty all around them. Yet those people do exist—people who have suffered more than you or me and yet remain more hopeful, more optimistic, and yes, even more joyful and happy.

Kahneman is saying that it is not our experiences but how we remember those experiences and even what experiences we choose to remember that have the most profound effect on our happiness. I see this in its extremes all the time. Frankly, the people who whine the most about how hard their lives are have very rarely experienced much to be disappointed about. They seem to find solace in their most negative memories, using these as a blank check that abdicates them from all personal responsibility. “I am how I am because of the pain of my past. If you had experienced what I have experienced, you would understand my bitterness, my anger, my paralysis, my despair.”

Perhaps the reason I found Kahneman's observations so compelling is that over a decade ago I wrote a book called
Uprising,
where I had made similar observations without the scientific or empirical data. Some of my conclusions were very personal. I remembered being shaped as a young boy by five or six of my most negative experiences. I relived those experiences over and over again. In fact, I can safely say that it was not those experiences but my decision to live in those experiences every day for the rest of my life that put me in psychiatric care by the time I was twelve and in and out of the hospital for psychosomatic disorders. As bad as my experiences may have been, other people have experienced far worse. I simply chose to be defined by my worst experiences and crafted my remembered self around them.

Somehow, around the age of thirteen I made a conscious decision to relinquish those memories as the material with which I defined my life. I could not change my experiences—what happened, happened—but I could change my focus and my interpretation. I began consciously rewriting my personal history, determined to learn from my most negative experiences and use them as the material to develop my best self. I also was determined to remember the best experiences ever given to me as a gift in my childhood. I cannot understate the power of this process. It not only changed how I remembered my childhood, but it changed me.

I know without any doubt that our experiences are not nearly as powerful as our memories. We must never allow ourselves to believe that we are the sum total of our experiences. Though our experiences are real, we are more than those experiences. The moment we define ourselves by our experiences, we have lost our way. Be informed by your experiences but do not be controlled by them.

What has happened to us is not nearly as powerful or as formative as our interpretation of why it happened. Our most destructive emotions, such as bitterness and unforgivingness, root deeply into the human soul not because of what happened to us but because we haven't resolved the issues of why. Why would someone hurt you? Why would someone betray you? Why would God allow this? Why did this happen to me? This is where interpretation becomes humanity's most powerful agent.

Your remembered self is your translation of life. It is the
why
to all the
what.
Interpretation is a form of selective memory. Because of the way the human brain is designed, when we remember a past experience we are actually reliving it. Our brains seem incapable of distinguishing the actual event from the remembered event. Within the construct of the human brain, the experience and the memory are one and the same.

Why in the world would we want to relive our worst moment a thousand times? We're not just reopening a wound; we're allowing ourselves to be wounded over and over. If forgiveness has no other value, it at least ends any control the other party has over our life. The unforgiven remain free to own us, to hurt us, to define us. We are never fully free until we have fully forgiven.

To engage our lives as a creative act, we must understand that a significant part of the creative process is interpretation. Our interpretation of life determines the material from which we will build the future. The great danger, of course, is that who we are and who we are meant to be can so easily be lost in translation.

One of the best examples of interpretation is the book of Job. I love how Job is written as a Greek tragedy: forty-plus chapters to bring us to one realization. The book begins with a conversation between God and Satan about the life of this man Job. The question posed to God by his nemesis is: Would Job still worship you if you were not so good to him?