For life’s sake, create lung space with the arts. A society that spends more on the arts will spend less on hospitals.
Saji P Mathew OFM
A person, who prays with books, art, music, dance, cinema, and the like (I call
them THE ARTS), will spend less time searching for hospitals. Medicines,
psychiatric treatments, and hospitals, of course, do a great service to get us back
on our health track, but remaining on track always is the key—I recommend the
arts. An individual or society who ignores books, unplug music, disengage with
theater and cinema, and disregard the arts would find themselves spinning along
the defeating cycle of falling ill, getting treated, well again, sick again, medicine
again, ill again, almost dead, back to health, fall sick again, and die. For life’s sake,
create lung space with the arts. A society that spends more on the arts will spend
less on hospitals—yes, prevention is better than cure.
Sir Ian McKellen, an English actor and British cultural icon, says, find out what
makes your soul grow: draw a picture, dance home after school, sing in the
shower, make your face in mashed potatoes, write a six-line poem, not to show
anyone, don't show it to anybody, discard them, you will find you have already
been gloriously rewarded for your work. It not only enables your becoming, but
also a proactive health management tip. Proactive physical and mental health
management is critical to a vital, vibrant, and rewarding life. The little arts that
we engage in daily contribute to proactive healthcare; and making it a habit
compound over time, creating remarkable improvements in overall health and
quality of life.
The modern urban existence with its daily grind and rat race, where individuals
are trapped in an exhausting cycle of overwork, constant stress, and perpetual
pursuit of financial and professional success, has devastating implications for
personal health. Escaping the rat race is fundamentally an act of radical self-care
and personal liberation, and the arts help do it.
How do the arts protect one from being consumed by the rat race? Art helps in
uncoiling, unwinding, and opening up one’s own doors to the outer world; it
shines on other doors so that one can see and move out through it.
Art helps one
go further. The further one goes, the lesser the weight one feels of one’s inherited
and native masks, the baggage of his/her past, and expectations of the future; the
world is better without masks, baggage, and the burden of expectations. The arts
and candidness and openness are almost synonymous; and doing them, and
engaging with them sets people free.
The more one is industrious and orderly,
less likely they are to embrace the spontaneity of the arts. Monetised arts, like
monetised spirituality, have no healing powers. There are fewer chances that a
really free person creates arts primarily for profit. This realisation makes one
embrace both, the arts and frugality. He is content and happy with a frugal life,
and might even look like a loser.
The arts make you want less. I don't know how it works, but it does. The French
says, that ‘our appetite grows with eating’, I would say that our appetite dies
down with the arts. The relationship between artistic engagement and frugal
living might seem counterintuitive at first glance, but the arts offer profound
insights and practices that can fundamentally transform one's approach to
consumption, value, and personal fulfillment.
Perhaps a musician who finds joy
in playing an instrument, a writer crafting a poem, or a painter exploring colour
and form discovers wealth that cannot be purchased, which is the inner joy of
creative expression and self satisfaction.
Healing engagement with the arts is a deliberate decision to be free of systems;
for systems do not nurture creativity, and so also therapy; they are the antithesis
of creativity and healing. Every system is power hierarchical, and at the bottom
of the hierarchy you should do what you are told to do, you are not there to think
outside the box, or think without the box; you are there to learn what you are
supposed to do and implement it. Systems place obedience above creativity and
conformity above healing. They prefer submissive machines and not imaginative,
resourceful artists. Obedience and conformity does not liberate, but binds people
even more strongly in the box.
Make life medicinal. Be mindful, engage in the arts, treat every act and choice as a
potential source of healing. Transform everyday life moments into a healing practice
that creates the essential ingredients for a quality life—meaning, connection, purpose,
and freedom.
