The Art of Living

On the ongoing practice of making a life.

Bend, Oregon // September 10, 2026

I've become increasingly interested in the idea that living is something we can get better at.

Not necessarily in the sense of becoming more productive, more successful, or even happier. But in the sense that being alive is something we spend our entire lives learning how to do.

And I think there's something really beautiful about that.

Because for all the things we're taught growing up, all the skills we're encouraged to develop, all the ways we're told to prepare ourselves for the future, there isn't really a particularly clear set of instructions for how to build a life.

We're given some general ideas, of course.

Go to school. Find work. Make money. Build relationships. Take care of yourself. Maybe start a family. Find something you enjoy doing.

And somewhere along the way, hopefully, figure out what makes all of it worthwhile.

But I think the more time I spend thinking about it, the more I realize how little of that process has a universally correct answer.

And maybe that's what makes living itself an art form.

A life as a creative practice

I've spent a good portion of my life making things.

Photographs, films, music, stories. And one of the things I love most about creating is that there's rarely a single correct way to approach it.

There are techniques to learn. Principles to understand. Skills that make certain things possible.

But at some point, you have to decide what you actually want to make.

You have to develop your own taste. Your own sensibilities. Your own understanding of what feels meaningful or beautiful or worth pursuing.

And I wonder if living isn't all that different.

We're all working with a particular set of circumstances. Different histories, relationships, opportunities, limitations, and ways of understanding the world.

And from those things, we're trying to make something.

A life.

Not necessarily something impressive. Not necessarily something that makes sense to everybody else.

Just something that feels like our own.

I think that's a distinction I've been learning to appreciate more as I get older.

Because it's remarkably easy to spend your life pursuing things that make sense on paper without ever stopping to ask whether they're things you actually want.

And it's equally easy to assume that the way someone else has built their life must somehow be the way we're supposed to build ours.

But I don't know that there's a particular formula.

I think there are just people, trying things, learning from them, changing their minds, and, hopefully, getting a little closer to understanding what matters to them.

The trouble with getting it right

I think one of the stranger things about being human is how much we want to know that we're doing things “correctly.”

We want to make the right decisions. Choose the right careers. Build the right relationships. Spend our time in the right ways.

And I understand that desire.

Our lives are finite, and the choices we make have consequences. Sometimes enormous ones.

But I wonder if the desire to get everything right can actually get in the way of living.

Because so much of life only makes sense in retrospect.

We make decisions with the information we have, discover things we couldn't have anticipated, and then try to figure out what to do with what we've learned.

And sometimes we get things terribly wrong.

Sometimes we spend years pursuing something only to discover that it isn't what we wanted after all.

Sometimes we change our minds about things we once believed with absolute certainty.

And sometimes the experiences we never would have chosen end up teaching us something we couldn't have learned any other way.

I don't think any of that necessarily means we've failed at living.

Maybe it's just part of the practice.

Learning how to pay attention

Something I've been thinking about a lot recently is the difference between building a life and actually experiencing it.

Because I think it's possible to become very good at the first and surprisingly disconnected from the second.

You can build a career, develop skills, create financial stability, accomplish things you're proud of, and still find yourself wondering why none of it feels quite the way you imagined it would.

I've certainly experienced some version of that myself.

And I think part of what I'm trying to learn now is how to be a little more present for the life I've already built.

Not just constantly working toward the next version of it.

To make things because I love making them.

To spend time with people because I enjoy being with them.

To allow myself to be curious about something without immediately needing to figure out what practical purpose that curiosity might serve.

And to recognize that the value of an experience doesn't necessarily depend on what it produces.

Which sounds pretty straightforward.

But I think it's something that can be surprisingly difficult to practice.

Especially when you've spent a long time measuring your days by what you've accomplished.

The lives we learn from

One of the things that fascinates me most is how differently people approach being alive.

Some people devote their lives to understanding the natural world. Some make art. Some build businesses. Some raise families. Some spend decades mastering a craft. Others seem to find enormous satisfaction in relatively simple, ordinary lives.

And I find all of that interesting.

Not because I think any one of those approaches is necessarily better than another, but because I think there's something valuable about understanding how other people have arrived at the lives they're living.

What they care about.

What they've sacrificed.

What they've changed their minds about.

What they wish they'd understood sooner.

And what they're still trying to figure out.

I think that's a big part of why I've become so interested in having conversations with people whose lives look different from my own.

Not necessarily to extract some lesson or piece of advice that I can apply to my own life.

But because every person offers another way of seeing what's possible.

And I think the more perspectives we're willing to consider, the more freedom we might find to build lives that actually make sense to us.

An unfinished work

And I just love the idea of thinking about a life as a work of art.

Not because I think our lives need to be beautiful all the time.

Art certainly isn't.

Some of the most meaningful things we create are complicated, uncomfortable, imperfect, or difficult to understand.

And I think life is much the same.

There are things we choose and things that happen to us. Things we make intentionally and things that emerge almost by accident. Parts we're proud of and parts we'd probably do differently if we had the chance.

And all of those things become part of the whole.

But unlike a painting or a song, we don't really get to stand outside our lives and see the finished thing.

We're always somewhere in the middle of making it.

Always learning. Always responding. Always becoming someone slightly different from the person we were before.

And I think there's something both humbling and liberating about that.

Because it means we don't have to have everything figured out.

We don't have to know exactly where we're going or what the finished thing is supposed to look like.

We just have to keep participating.

Keep paying attention.

Keep making choices that feel honest to who we are, while remaining willing to discover that we might be wrong.

And maybe that's the art of living.

Not arriving at some perfect understanding of how life ought to be lived, but developing a relationship with the experience of being alive.

One that allows for curiosity, uncertainty, love, disappointment, creativity, and change.

One that recognizes that a meaningful life isn't necessarily something we find waiting for us somewhere in the future.

It's something we make.

And something we get to keep making, for as long as we're here.