Don’t fret about the future, live fully in the here and now

In a recent interview, Isabella Ducrot, a 95-year-old Italian artist whose paper and textile explorations have become widely admired, cheerfully acknowledges that she does not have a future. Rather she has a present. This is how she measures her life. This is where she finds happiness.

Sheila Hicks, 92, a renowned textile artist, embraces her own present in the same way. In sharing their practice, they both speak of those moments of discovery and the joy they daily encounter because of the journey they are taking within them.

While cultural depictions often render the elderly as incidental and burdensome, the words of creators like Hicks and Ducrot reimagine and redefine agedness.

Hicks characterizes the medium in which she works as a way of bringing “softness” into a world that is hard. Ducrot reveals how she amuses herself “madly” within the realm of “surprise,” that mysterious space often called the liminal or the in-between where she dwells as an artist.

For both, the present matters, each moment dear: in the heat of these moments they engage creative processes that transfigure.

In my own present, while clock time moves more quickly, I too find moments expand. Moments of Being. That’s what Virginia Woolf called them. Moments of heightened consciousness that spark connection and invention. I don’t think the medium matters, the nature of the artistry — weaving, knitting, cooking, storytelling, birding, singing, gardening… I understand how generous such moments can be, moments more possible now given that the demands that accompanied my early and middle ages, where multiple responsibilities collided — schooling, mothering, working, housekeeping, caregiving, wife-ing (if that isn’t a word, I would like to introduce it) — no longer collide.

It is true I am slower; names elude me, my body suffers time’s natural wear and tear. I require a range of medical appointments and treatments. I have no idea how long I have left, what circumstance may remove me from the galaxy, but I do know I can regulate sufficiently to imagine stories and take them to the page, rework them, pursue graphic storytelling elements, play with colour and line, host my garden’s ambition and ongoing evolution.

When I think of the shift in my own internal rhythm and understanding, the space given because I am more free (and I don’t undermine the luck such a gift brings in my life), I re-enter the words provided by both Hicks and Ducrot: “surprise,” “softness,” amusement. I treasure those days that come without obligation, the days that are “empty” yet full of the desire to reflect, to observe, to give voice and form to memory, experience, dream.

In doing so, I learn to put my inner critic — Am I good enough? Has my life been meaningless? Will what I do matter? — aside. I learn how to enjoy my creative energy without hope of praise or blame. It is hard, because I have been conditioned to rely on external validation, but in my third-act path, I play as I have seen children play before they are taught to rely on grades and external systems of validation.

I remember a now-famous 1968 experiment that revealed that the creativity of 98 per cent of the five-year-old participants in that experiment ranked at the genius level. Their innovative capacity as they grew into adulthood declined, and as adults only two per cent were ranked at that level. Creativity is so often diminished by systems that reward a perceived, traditionally approved “right” answer.

I try to unhinge that conditioning, open the circuitry such authorities superintend. I move to softness, to granting myself permission, to the making of mistakes, buoyed by Samuel Beckett who invites humans to “Fail again. Fail better.” Inside that phrase is the release that comes with “try.”

This is what I attempted to bring to others as an educator; this is what I bring to myself as a third-act student of inquiry and experimentation. It is a homecoming, a more vibrant return to self, to an appreciation for the arts of being and making.

In considering anew the thrill that comes with releasing my present from a future, I understand that it does not matter how many days I might have left in my corner of the ring as it were. What is important is the ring itself, and the day gifted within it. I attempt to give shape to something that matters to me, might matter elsewhere. In all that is hard in this world we wake up to every day, I am alive in the soft embrace of the transformative energy of the moment and the processes heated within it, stirred by the yearning to wonder, respond and wonder anew.

Ah, the heat of the moment. I would not turn down its flame.