Craft, Trade, Art, and Everything Along the Way, Part 2

More ramblings on art, but this time, with extra work...

When I was a scout leader, I noticed something about kids (mostly girls) around 5th grade:

They stopped calling themselves "artists."

Ask any preschooler or early elementary school kid about career aspirations, and you'll get all kinds of answers--dancer, musician, fireman, policeman, president, and things you aren't even sure could be actual professions, but you're willing to entertain, because who knows what these smart kids might come up with in twenty years?

Kids that age don't seem to see limitations. They believe they can do anything, and they don't believe that artists must be poor or unfulfilled.

Sometime around 5th grade, that seems to change. Maybe it's puberty, maybe it's growing self-consciousness, maybe it's that the world gets bigger and they start to compare their work with professional work, maybe it's the fact that they start to receive more feedback, and it's not all positive--they seem to shift toward more "realistic" professions. Or, if they were always focused on more realistic professions, they seem to stop thinking of creative pursuits even as hobbies.

I know this isn't a thought unique to me. I'm sure that every parent, teacher, child psychologist, pediatrician, and cafeteria lady has thought the same thing at some point. And I know it's not every kid. There are some who still revel in creative pursuits or acknowledge that they need to build a life that includes room for art.

But here's the thing, and this is where I'm picking up my thoughts from last week: I think we're all artists.

Adding Work to the Mix

Once again, I consulted the Online Etymology Dictionary to look up the origin of "work." As I suspected, it's an Old English word that traces it's origins to a Proto-Germanic word (the "w" and the "k" were dead giveaways). It had four different connotations:

• "A deed, something done, action (whether voluntary or required), proceeding, business"

• "That which is made or manufactured, products of labor"

• "Physical labor, toil; skilled trade, craft, or occupation; opportunity of expending labor in some useful or remunerative way"

• "Military fortification"

Aside from that last one, the other three seem to dovetail fairly well with the origins of the word "art." If "art" can refer to a work of art, practical skill, a business, or a craft, then it seems to me that anything we do is both work and art.

I think maybe art is work and work is art.

Take another step back to something that's both theological and observational to me.

Human beings need purpose. We need to have a reason to get out of bed every day--something to do with our time and our resources. Sometimes, that means getting up to feed a baby; sometimes it means going to the hospital to do brain surgery. From our earliest days, we seek structure and purpose, trying to fit our bodies and brains into some kind of function that makes sense, stretching our abilities so we can do the next thing, the harder thing, the bigger thing. When we don't have this kind of purpose, we quickly grow depressed. We channel our need for purpose into unhealthy things, or we just wither on the vine.

There are a million iterations of this. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop," our Puritan ancestors might say, and I'm sure some would accuse me of just bringing that Puritan work ethic forward.

I'll not deny that I am a product of a country deeply imbued with that work ethic. I'm sure it's part of my own makeup. I know I feel deeply guilty when I "take a day off." Last weekend, I had the house to myself, and I spent most of Saturday on the couch watching movies. But I was only able to justify that level of laziness because I had done a bit of writing in the morning and I worked on my current crochet project while "watching" (mostly listening to) movies I've seen several times already.

Even when I could have done nothing all day and no one would have ever known, I needed to produce something.

(And also, I then really needed to clean the house on Sunday because I "wasted" my Saturday.)

I genuinely believe that work is a feature of humanity, not a bug. I think that even in places without that deep ancestral Puritan echo, even beyond meeting basic physical needs, humans are still driven to work--and driven to create.

Fixing the Broken Parts

Here's what I think. I think our work is how we try to create order out of chaos--how we try to put a broken place back together.

This is why we clean toilets and mow lawns and change the oil in the car and sew buttons back in place.

It's why we get obsessed with our sourdough starters and try to keep houseplants alive and raise chickens.

It's why we replenish the refrigerator and cupboards, why we donate to charity and church, why we take meals to sick friends.

It's why we extract raw materials from nature and recombine them into things that are more useful than the original--and why we try to find more efficient, less harmful ways of extracting those raw materials, because we don't want to break anything more than it's already broken.

We can paint any of these activities with a patina of alternative explanations. We want to avoid processed foods or fulfill a duty to take care of those less fortunate or reduce pollution and carbon emissions--whatever alternate explanation fits, we're pretty good at finding it and applying it.

And those alternative explanations for seeking purpose and meaning in the form of work are all contributing factors.

But ultimately, I think all those things are just our human attempts to fix a brokenness we sense in the world, whether it's inside us or our communities, churches, country, or world.

It's hardwired into us. We need work.

And if work and art are basically on the same spectrum of human activity, then doesn't it seem like we're all "artists" at some level?

Curlicues on Our Letters

I think that we sort of inherently understand work. Work is what we do to survive. It's earning money to provide food, shelter, and clothing. It's cooking and cleaning and serving the needs of our kids and partners and pets. For many people, it still means coaxing food from the ground or hunting it on a plain or in a forest. Obviously, the easier it gets to provide those basic needs, the more we become concerned with personal fulfillment through our daily work--with finding purpose and meaning.

And this is where art comes in, I think.

If work is a way to order our world by providing for needs and, in theory, improving our lot in life, maybe art is just the next step in creating order out of chaos.

For some of us, that next step is writing a story or painting a picture or composing an opera--taking the raw materials of language, color, and music and putting them together to help shape and explain something about the world, a way to make something beautiful out of brokenness.

But I don't think this way of thinking is out of reach for anyone. I think that, just as I believe we are all creative, we can start to look at everything we do as art and then "put curlicues on our letters," as a commenter suggested in a reply on one of my Substack Notes.

Art is taking an extra moment to wipe down a grungy baseboard during otherwise routine housework (ask me how I know).

It's adding a friendly comment or compliment to a work e-mail.

It's sprinkling a garnish over a homecooked meal, or making a small house repair that everyone has been overlooking for months, or pruning back trees and weeding the garden.

What if we just started thinking of art as indistinguishable from our humanity--a way to reorder the brokenness around us and restore connections? To go the extra mile and add finishing touches and participate in repairing chaos?

Okay, listen. I know this is kind of "woo woo," and it's maybe stretching the idea and definition of art pretty thin. I understand that language has context, and in our world, right now, at this moment in the United States in 2025, "work" and "art" are two different things.

But I do think it might be helpful for all of us to start thinking of ourselves as "artists"--to start seeing everything we do as either helpful or harmful to a world that wants to drift toward chaos.

And if it helps to think of cleaning a toilet as art?

Well, maybe I can live with that.

Next week, I have some thoughts about writers as book reviewers to share, and as you might expect, my ideas don't really align with some of the conventional wisdom from indie authors...

See you then.