Art will save you
A conversation I had with my wife while driving today.
Charlotte is an avid blog reader. Her medium of choice is XiaoHongShu, in Mandarin Chinese, “Little Red Book”. It looks a bit like Pinterest and is aimed primarily at a female audience.
There’s been this blogger she’s been following who claims that her family has maintained six generations of relatively decent wealth. When you realise that this stretches back beyond the Cultural Revolution where a lot of wealth that came from “old money” had been obliterated, this makes it even more interesting.
A lot of the culturally beautiful aspects of China in that period had been destroyed. This blogger spoke about the lessons that her father imparted on her to help her rebuild wealth in a sustainable way that not only focused on money, but also internal fulfillment.
He was blunt with her, saying that that if a woman wanted to lead a comfortable life, she had to either find love and dedicate herself to a man, or a find a craft she could fall in love with and dedicate herself to that. He stressed that the latter was a priority because creating beautiful art was distinctly human and would create value in the world.
She had taken her time but found her niche to be writing screenplays for traditional Chinese opera. People would hire her to write entire performances for them. To her, this remained more so a passion rather than a job, but it fulfilled her in ways that money couldn’t buy.
In this day and age where distraction reigns supreme, having something creative to fall back on can help when you most need it. What sort of art do you create — or have you been meaning to create?
