I found this video of a sand art performance the other day. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time - the artwork that the artist creates, the vivid story she tells so silently and the way in which she creates it. Take a moment to watch it, and as you watch, imagine what it might be like to be this artist and to experience the act of creating in the way that she does it:

Isn’t it just so amazing and free?!

I’ve spoken before about the way that Agile Living is about having an open mind, open heart and open hands. It’s not just a mindset - it’s ultimately about being able to move freely in both mind and body, without stuckness, rigidity and mental limitations, so that you can respond creatively and make your contribution in the world, and live an expansive life, regardless of what goes on around you. When I watched this sand art performance, I thought to myself, “That’s how I want to live my life,” and I wondered what beliefs and values I’d have to have about the creative process to enjoy living and creating in this way. Here’s some of what came to mind:

You can create out of nothing.

This woman turns dirt into stories of people who come to life and have struggles and sadnesses and lonelinesses and losses, and so much more. We often make excuses: “I don’t have the right equipment, so I can’t do my thing…” Telling ourselves that we need more equipment, information, people or money, before we can step out and start is a form of resistance, and it’s based in our lizard fears and scarcity mindset, and the Western idea that, in order to progress, we need to add more information or skill or people or money. Forget all the bells and whistles, and start doing your thing with gusto now - in some small way, with what you’ve got right now. You can always adjust and tweak it as you grow your resources, and incorporate more bells and whistles later.

Give your best right now, even when there’s risk of loss. Or perhaps because there’s risk of loss.

This felt like the theme of the story she told, and it’s also very much the theme of her creative process. As an artist who loves both the process and the product of art-making, I’m amazed at her willingness to give her best into creating a particular scene and then be completely willing to wipe it away and have it never exist again. A part of me was saying, “Thank goodness for the person who had the wits to record this on video!” And I wondered what it would be like to make art in this way, unrecorded, knowing that you’re going to destroy your beautiful work, and it’ll never exist again.

I wondered what would it be like to live this way - giving your best to everything you do, expanding and making your contribution, in spite of all the risks, and being completely willing for it all to be taken from you at any point. We place so much of our focus on building our little forts in the world, and trying to create security by surrounding ourselves with material stuff or trying to get positional power, all the while putting off living freely and enjoying life until we’ve got the “financial security” to do what we want to do. Security doesn’t come from controlling the material world or preventing chaos. Security comes from knowing that, whatever happens, you can handle it. What’s it like when you imagine having that much faith in your own imagination, resourcefulness and ability to create what you love and need out of nothing?

Some things get better when you take stuff away.

Often we hold onto stuff in our lives just because we’ve invested a lot into it in the past and we tell ourselves that our investment would be wasted if we wiped the slate clean and moved on to create something totally different. We have so many negative associations with the ideas of loss and destruction. But loss and destruction are crucial parts of the whole creative process. In order to create the mental space for us to think differently and create something new, we have to dissolve what we thought we knew and unlearn what we’ve been taught. Just like the sand artist removed sand in order to create her pictures, our lives become more beautiful when we remove the beliefs we’ve learned that are standing between us and the picture we want.

What’s it like when you imagine creating, adapting, shaping, dismantling and recreating your life or business in this way?

You can find the Sand Art Video over here.

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