Creating Something Beautiful: The Synthesis of Our Pain

Creativity is the only thing. We all enter these states of confusion, disrepair and darkness at times. These can be particularly distressing if you don’t know what they’re about – what you can mine from them or what their meaning is in your life. But the secret is in the sauce: making sense of and meaning of your brokendownness. It’s about what beauty you can make from the ugliness, the despair. All beauty emerges from darkness. What else is life about?

I often say the only thing that really helps people is helping them identify or guiding them to their own solutions. Sharing with them some “answer” from scientific research is not exactly the formation of a beautiful narrative we are after. Even sharing what has worked for you in your life is not the point. People have a need to come up with some answers on their own, to make something really beautiful out of their own pain. You should trust them to do that. That is something only they can do in their way.

It is not just a theoretically true concept that to sublimate our pain is the way. It is what we are all already doing in real life in our own way. We all want to have control of our lives and to synthesize our life experiences, no matter how horrific, into a beautiful story and creation. There are many ways we do this: music, visual art, story, cinema (and those are not all). There is only one answer and a million answers for most things and it is whatever each person has decided is the right way to synthesize their pain. The assimilation of the deepest, darkest pain into art and beauty is our endeavor in this world. I’m happy to be next to you doing it.