I’ve always admired the seeming freedom of artists to pursue their passions. While my career has been in the sciences, there’s this feeling inside me that I should also allow myself to live as imaginatively as good artists do, and by “artists” I include not only painters and sculptors but also poets, photographers and designers. So when I retired from my work as a university professor, I wasted no time learning to be an “explorer” in the broadest sense.

There’s a difference between experiments and explorations. An experiment seeks to prove or disprove some theory. The goal is to see what works and what doesn’t. The payoff is data that proves to evidence. Many of us live life as series of experiments. There isn’t bad in itself; indeed it is necessary for survival. But a life lived like one big experiment can be dry, spiritually and emotionally. What’s missing is exploration.

An explorer seeks to traverse the unknown, to wander into the landscapes one didn’t even know exists. The goal can the journey itself or the destination and the reward is discovery – of ideas, thoughts, beauty, and unimagined wonders. And I think to myself: why not make life into a series of explorations as well, and thereby live a life fuller and more enriched by unforgettable experiences. I’m not just speaking of physically traveling to wonderful places (though my definition of being an explorer certainly includes that). I also mean an arm-chair sort of exploration to enrich one’s imagination the way the best artists strife to do.

I’m clearly not the only one who thinks a full life should include explorations in this broad sense. In his masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) muses:

Eternal tourists of ourselves that we are, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing..

Although sounding quite negative, I think what Pessoa was trying to say is that we are ultimately more than material beings. Therefore, relentlessly accumulating “stuffs” will not satisfy our deepest needs.

And what are these needs? Pessoa elaborates:

To feel everything in every way, to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination…

I love this passage, for it nails down what Pessoa argues is essential to a richer life. If it is not material possessions, then it must be the soul’s need for that which is intangible – the joy of feeling and thinking with emotions as Pessoa puts it, not forgetting, feeling with the mind (in other words, feeding the intellect). Isn’t these what artists do or strive for? An inner life rich with uplifting emotions and thoughts?

So how does on live an artful life? One does not have to practise making art (though that would be wonderful), but at the very least, one can learn to feel and think like an artist. Which brings me to another luminary – the American poet and nature lover, Wendell Berry (b. 1934), who in his poem, “How to be a Poet” offers wise advise on how we can be an artist of any kind. The prerequisites, according to Berry, are simple: the ability to sit still, to read, to quieten ourselves and reflect, the patience to wait for moments of discovery and inspiration. Simple enough but hard to put into practice, especially in today’s context. Interestingly, although Berry’s poem first appeared in 1964, it includes the prescient advice to “shun electric wire” and to “stay away from screens.” Of course, he could not have foreseen the little screens that now possess so many of us, which makes his poem all the more remarkable for its insights into human nature.

Without much ado. here is Wendell Berry in “How to be a Poet”

HOW TO BE A POET (from New Collected Poems, 1964)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be Quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill – more of each
than you have – inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimension life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.