Creating Art When You Are Busy Living

Don't feel bad about your erratic creative journey

In Barranquilla, on Good Fridays, my mom wouldn’t let us do anything at all.

She would say that anything we did, we were doing it to Jesus’ body. So when my friends asked if I could join them in the field to play soccer, I would ask my mom. She responded, “Si pates una bola es como patearle la cabeza a Jesucristo.” (Kicking a ball was like kicking the head of Jesus Christ.)

Now, what ten-year-old wants to do that?

No one! Forget it! Especially when eternal damnation, torment, and condemnation were at stake.

The only thing we were allowed to do was go to church or watch religious movies.

That’s how I ended up watching a movie I constantly think about. I bring it up in conversations whenever there is a remote connection to it, hoping that somebody else has seen it.

“Fourth Wise Man” had Martin Sheen and Alan Arkin on it. Come on! Somebody must have seen this movie. So far, I have yet to meet someone that has.

It was a movie about the other wise man in the nativity scene that didn’t make it to the birth.

The fourth Magi, Artaban, was supposed to meet with Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar but got sidetracked when someone asked him for help. By the time he was done helping that person, he tried to meet with the rest of the group, only to find the group had moved on.

The magi spent the rest of his life trying to meet Jesus, and every time he got close, somebody asked for his help, and he always gave it selflessly. This act of generosity and charity always kept him from his desire to meet Jesus. This dynamic went on for all of Jesus’ life until the day he was crucified outside of Jerusalem—Jesus, not Artaban.

At the same time that Jesus was dying, Artaban was hit in the head by a roof tile, and as he was dying, a voice told him that God had accepted his charity. Or something of the sort. He was now going to heaven, where he would meet Jesus. One can hope the afterlife exists so Artaban could be rewarded for his deeds.

From all the stories I know of catholicism, there is not one I think of more often than this one. The story is not part of the bible or any other spiritual or cosmological lore. It was written by an American and published in 1895.

Never mind that. The story stuck with me because of the message at the core: on our journey to our dreams, life happens.

When I graduated high school, I vehemently told my mom I was not going to college immediately. I was taking a year off to write a novel and then would go to college. To which she responded, “The hell you are.”

I depended on my mom for a roof and sustenance, I did what I was asked of me. I went to college dutifully to study engineering like all god-fearing, mother-loving kids do in Colombia.

I have always harbored a secret desire to spend all of my day writing, doing nothing else but writing.

Life has never allowed for such a luxury. After three years in college, I moved to San Diego. There, I took the bus everywhere, took several jobs at a time, started college again, met my wife, moved again, started a family, and many other milestones, successes, failures, events, and many, many steps my Apple Health currently tracks along with the intimate conversations I have with my wife. “For the last time, I did not say butt pluck, Siri!”

Your life probably looks like mine. Maybe a little more, perhaps a little less chaotic. But something like it.

As I look back on the erratic journey of my life, I can’t help but think that my writing is much richer because of everything I’ve been through. It is that more human.

Writing all day is still a worthy goal. However, the isolation from only being immersed in craft and not life is evident in writers who spend and have spent, all their days writing without living.

There is a pale quality to their work. Their conversations sound made up. They don’t know how ordinary people behave or react. They want to write entire encyclopedic novels about writers who want to write with the resolution inevitably being the writer writes all day. Now, the writer is finally happy, as if happiness is permanent and not fleeting.

This is what creating work from ivory towers looks like. A mistake I see many people in the intelligentsia do. They forget what it is like to be a pedestrian. But it is in that space where the rest of us live.

It is perfectly reasonable to desire to write and read all day long. It is a great goal to pursue. But it is also important not to feel guilty when we can’t. Feelings of shame and guilt never lead anywhere. It’s like the saying, “Worrying is like a rocking chair; it gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.”

What if we could separate time from art-making and art appreciation?

We write and read when we can and as much as possible. But we also live fully when we have to live knowing that it is okay to go to work and put food on the table. A writer with an empty stomach can write, but only for so long before they die of hunger. But one with a full belly can always come back to tinker with their craft.