Making Shapes with Clay

"Stop giving someone else the job of making you happy"  - Joyce Meyer

This has been a full week. Between getting all kinds of riled up about the new limited practice, the self-work for me, continues. This week I've come into the realisation that I am everything, and nothing yet. I was driving around somewhere and I just remember thinking that there is no law saying that I, or you, have to be one way and one way only. I don't know if you've experienced this, but I think by the time I hit 23/24 years old I was sure that I had become me. I have always been the mature-for-my-age, introspective, self-aware sort, and based on this I was secure in who I was. In my mind it meant that I'd still learn things, of course, but I was a building and you could add bricks, increasing height or width, but the structure was concrete, plastered and relatively finished. I don't believe this any more.

Source

Now, I think that we are like a large piece of clay, sitting on a display slab. If we are clay, the display slab is life and you don't know what conditions exist on the slab you find yourself on. You could have a barren, empty space with no thing or no one to clue you in on what your clay could make, who you could be, or you could find yourself on a display slab that already contains objects and suggestions for what you might become. In my new interpretation of life, I see us all as having the ability to break off little pieces of ourselves and roll them out, set them down and shape them into whatever little thing we need that piece to be. I see each piece of clay as its own personal interjection - be a model air plane enthusiast or a semi-professional golfer with a little piece, and a father or mother, a CEO or a cashier with another piece. I believe that the colour of your clay is like who you are - this is the one place I see consistency living - where I thought that being consistent meant being one way, I now think that your heart should be in everything you do. I think the colour of your clay, your heart, should be easily seen in every shape you roll out.

For me, I find this freeing, because it means that I hold myself to the same accountability of being genuine, but I take it a step further, because now I'm not trying to take my whole bulk from one place to the next expecting it to fit there. I'm not saying that I am definitely only what I have already seen of myself, and I am no longer of the opinion that all of me has been discovered. There is enough clay in me to be making shapes for the rest of my life. This is also liberating because it means that there is room to create. There is room to breathe in a world where everything that will be is not yet. Mystery excites and refreshes! The grounding qualifier is that you keep stock of all your shapes - you hold yourself to the standard that brings all your facets back to the same clay, but the facets can be endless.

Naill Doherty describes it this way: if you have a rigid self concept then you assume that you know exactly how the world works and your place in it, and that is dangerous. Yes, it is important to know who you are, but adding fluidity to who you could be is, I think, where freedom comes.

So, in a world where you have the freedom of versatility, what shapes would you make?