Make more mess and care less for making it mean something

"True freedom, our personal liberation, is to live without anxiety about imperfection." Zen master Seng-tsan

One of my favourite gigs is writing for the wellbeing pages of a children and teenagers’ magazine. From coming up with ideas and background research, to interviewing experts and practitioners as well as children, I receive the benefit as much as I hope young readers do – in particular, the benefit of considering anew subjects that I think I “know” about from a different, simpler and therefore more profound perspective.

As adults, we can get so full, in fact stuffed full, of information and so-called knowledge that we stumble over all the information we consume due to the socialised idea that we need to know more in order for our work and our words to be worth more. Rather than enabling ourselves to find our creative freedom and flow, we disempower ourselves with the weight of expectation and information and get in our own way.

In recent contributions, I’ve written about the importance of imperfection as a route to embracing our humanity for all its messy wonder, and creativity for its own sake when freed of the idea of things having to be either right or good, and the worry of being wrong or bad. 

In short – enjoy making a mess, don't fear mistakes, let it all be okay, and care a little less, because not everything has to mean something or matter beyond the thing itself.

Ultimately, my intention in writing these pieces is to encourage readers (and in the process, I remind myself) to consider alternative ways of nurturing our wellbeing through playful exploration, and finding freedom from the anxiety of thinking or feeling we have to be good or clever. Not that there is anything wrong or bad about being good or clever – rather, those labels and qualities can be loaded with expectations that hinder rather than support our flourishing.

Writing these pieces, and exploring the ideas that I write about, is a useful, humbling and re-empowering reminder of the gifts of a childlike perspective, which is one that is free of conditioning, culturation and cultivation – where the latter might be considered ways in which society, education and all manner of systems prune, prettify, preen and perfect us in their image.