I just started drawing and painting again last week after stopping for a couple of months. Since then I’ve been trying to do it more regularly, hoping to incorporate it as a daily practice.
Previously I was hoping that drawing would be my hobby, so I was waiting to like doing it. So when things got stressful and depressing in my life, drawing was one of the first things that got dropped. It is difficult to do something that one doesn’t like doing. It feels like a chore.
I’m not really sure why, but recently I had a semi-conscious mindset shift. I realised instead of hoping that drawing would become my hobby, I should see it as a meditation practice.
There are many forms of meditation, but one of the most talked-about is mindfulness meditation. We take deep breaths focusing on each breath, bringing our attention back to the breath when our minds start to wander. It sounds really simple but most people find it difficult to even start. Anyone would think sitting and breathing is one of the simplest things humans can do but in reality we would do anything to avoid it. That’s the paradoxical magic of it: it is so simple that anyone could do it, but so difficult in practice that just merely managing to have a regular practice of this simple act can bring profound benefits.
Many of us go about our days in a disassociated state, going through our routines on autopilot mindlessly. We are almost never fully present, not knowing what it means to give our full attention to a moment. Our mind automatically likes to wander, going everywhere except here. The point of practicing meditation as I interpret it is to strengthen our ability to notice this phenomenon, and thereafter attempt to be fully present in the moment. The concept of being fully present can be vague, especially if we’re so used to being neither here nor there. It is the ability to be aware of what truly matters in that particular moment – the actual reality we are experiencing without being coloured by the past, future, biases, projections. Plenty of our suffering is caused by our thoughts and the feelings generated by those thoughts. If we’re lucky, meditation allows us to see that it is possible to have some distance between our thoughts and us.
Since meditation is difficult for most people to practice, it also has this effect of improving our ability to regulate and self-direct our selves. By practicing the capacity to practice – doing something we don’t necessarily want to do but because we recognise that it could be beneficial – we may develop the psychological muscle to will ourselves to do something difficult even if we don’t want to.
This is the role of drawing as a practice for me. I do it precisely because I don’t want to do it. This is why I have started to see it as practice, not a hobby. It is about learning how to show up, and not feeling over-dependent on my moods to do something. How difficult can opening up a sketchbook and making a few squiggles be? I am not afraid to ugly draw (or so I think), so it should be easy. But it just feels so difficult.
But if I do start, it becomes truly meditative for me. I go into a zone where it is just me and my drawing. My mind thinks of nothing else. Is it because it takes that much mental focus to draw something? I feel strangely exhausted after.
In many ways I am a very fuzzy person. When I see things I see fuzzy impressions of them. Drawing is teaching me to notice the details, to improve my observations skills. Instead of bringing my attention to my breath I start to notice where the line should start and end, where the light and shadow should go. Attention is a requisite of drawing. I am still nowhere good at it, but I notice that I am noticing. I am using my hands to make intricate movements, instead of clicking on a mouse and tapping on keys. I have terrible motor skills which just seems to be inborn but I lean into them nonetheless. Every jerky unintended movement makes its own art – my eyes see something, and my hands interprets it into something else.
My drawing looks nothing like the actual thing, but it is mine. The lines are uneven, the proportions and perspectives are all wrong, the colours are rudimentary. But all of these imperfections can only come out of my hands and my mind. It is an outcome that can only be produced from the person I am and the (lack of) skills I possess at that very moment. It is an expression of me living in that moment. All of this will never come by again. A lesson in zen.
I am telling myself to simply show up. Make a squiggle into my sketchbook. Any squiggle. Accept the mistakes, tolerate the smudges. Some days nothing looks good, but I drew.
I actually like my drawings, despite my obvious lack of technical ability. They just feel so utterly me. It is as though if I could melt my soul into lines, colours and brush strokes this would be the outcome. I am messy, smudged, skewed and jagged, just like them.
p.s. When my friend asked me how I would remember her after she’s gone, I told her I would make a drawing and burn it for her (it is a singaporean chinese custom to burn things for people to receive it in the afterlife). She has always been an artist and loves drawing, so I thought it would be apt to remember her this way. It has been a month since she’s gone. This post is written in her memory.