The Illusion of Stability (in Art and Life)

Growing up, I've always been someone who wanted stability and security in my life.

I wanted to feel a sense of stability in my job, relationships, and in any other situation I can think of. I was always afraid of change and wanted things to stay the same. Probably because it was just familiar to me and made me feel safe.

I didn’t realize how much of my peace depended on things not changing.

We learn from a young age to look for stability in just about everything we do. After a while, stability becomes something we try to manufacture.

The problem with this is that is just doesn't line up with reality.

Life doesn't happen in a straight line. Our health, our creativity, and our energy fluctuate. Unexpected things happen in our life which force us to change direction. This is just the reality of life and the more we try to force our life to happen in a straight line the more anxiety we feel.

We know that when creating art there's no guarantee of a good piece. And life is the same way. There's no guarantees.

So if stability isn't what we imagined it as, what is it and what does all this mean?

Why Stability Feels So Convincing

When something is familiar, we don’t have to think as much.

We know what tomorrow roughly looks like. We know what’s expected of us. There’s a rhythm we can fall into, and that rhythm creates the feeling of safety.

A feeling that we are in control.

For artists and creatives, this feeling provides us with a false sense of stability.

Creative work is unpredictable by nature. Some days things flow effortlessly. Other days, nothing works no matter how hard we try to force it. Some days are just made for making crappy art. So when we find something in life that feels predictable, we cling to it and hope for it to always stay the same.

It balances out all the uncertainty we experience with our creative work.

The problem with this is that we tie our sense of safety to external things.

Sure, some things in life can seem safer than others but this is just another part of the illusion. We tie this stability to our jobs, our routines, or the roles we play in life. Over time, these things may not even serve us anymore but we stick with them because they're familiar to us.

The problem is that none of these things are truly stable.

They feel stable only because they haven’t changed yet.

We mistake familiarity for safety.

Stability, Change, and Learning to Move With Life

This past year has been a time of transition and a bit of chaos for me as well. I've had a couple of major life changes all at the same time and it's been challenging trying to juggle all of them.

I just recently lost my job I had for 13 years, although I kind of quit at the same time. A few months before that I moved across the country, traveled to Malaysia and spent 3 months there, and also got married.

Even though these are all changes I've wanted for a few years now, I felt anxious when they finally did happen. The sense of security I thought I had disappeared almost overnight.

It wasn't the change itself that was surprising, it was how anxious I felt when it finally did happen.

I thought about this a bit and tried to understand why I felt like this.

I think it's because we think life is like being a tree. Mostly stable the entire time while everything around us changes. We stay in the same place and change a little from time to time but everything is familiar to us. And we steadily grow in one direction.

This is the illusion we live in.

I think life is more like being a leaf floating in a river. There are moments of calm and peace and then there are moments of turbulence and disruption. A lot of the time, things are out of our control. Sometimes they happen overnight or in an instant.

We like to think we’re in control of life, but really we’re only in control of how we respond to it.

In art, we control our process but not the outcome.

So the problem isn't that things change in our lives. The problem is where we place our sense of stability.

How I’m Learning to Live Without False Stability

All of the things I’m learning to do now are simple in principle, but difficult to live by consistently.

I stopped expecting certainty​.

The first thing I had to do was to change how I thought about the future.

I could no longer expect all the things I've become accustomed to. I practice this mindset when painting because a good painting is never guaranteed. It's not something to expect to happen.

I now have to take that mindset and use it in all other areas of my life like my income and the path of my life. Uncertainty now has to be the default state, which sounds like a negative thing but it's forcing me to live more in the moment than before.

Once the initial anxiety and fear faded, I'm left with motivation to move forward and focus on what needs to be done. I feel a sense of clarity because uncertainty seems to reveal what matters most to me.

So my focus turns to what I can control, which brings me to the next point.

I'm narrowing my attention to what I can control daily.

When I traveled to Malaysia, I stayed in a small village in the mountains for 3 months. This wasn't a convenient stay in a big city with everything I needed easily available.

So for the first couple of days, I felt like I didn't belong at all.

I didn't know where to buy food or which stores to go to. I'd go to local restaurants and not know where or how to order food. Cars drive on the opposite side of the road.

The changes felt endless. Everything seemed unfamiliar.

It was super frustrating in the beginning and sometimes even discouraging. I felt like giving up.

But after a week or two of navigating all the new challenges and changes, everything started to feel normal. When I stopped resisting and complaining, and accepted how things were, only then was I able to adapt.

I focused on what I could do and control. I can't control what side of the road the cars drove on. But I could learn what time things opened and closed and plan accordingly. I could learn how things were done and learn to do them the same way everyone else does them.

All of this was in my control and that's where I turned my focus to.

I'm trusting cycles instead of timelines​.

Everything in nature pretty much runs on cycles.

Over the years, I've realized that when I'm struggling with something, I can almost always find the answer by looking to nature.

So something I've been trying to embrace more and more is being in tune with myself and going with the flow. Not in some abstract way though. I just mean trying to keep a healthy balance of everything in my life.

I want to work enough but not too much. I want to make sure I rest enough so that when I do work, I can focus well.

I want to eat healthy so that I feel good most of the time, but a nice treat every now and then is good too.

There will probably be times where I feel alive and energized with my art and work, and I'll work harder than normal. And other times where I feel discouraged or even bored with my work and work less.

I do still think discipline is necessary but using it in a way that coexists with the ideas of cycles and seasons of work, rest, growth, and play.

Acceptance, Trust, and the Long View

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."

- Alan Watts

I don’t think the answer to uncertainty is trying to eliminate it.

I think the answer is learning how to live with it.

The more I pay attention to nature, to creative work and art, and to my own life, the clearer this becomes. Everything moves in cycles. Energy rises and falls. Growth happens and then rest comes. Nothing stays fixed for long, and nothing is meant to. Change is constant.

Sometimes the change is incredibly fast and other times it happens over millennia.

Trying to freeze life into something stable only creates tension. It asks life to be something it isn’t. And by doing that, it turns us against ourselves.

When we accept change instead of resisting it, we stop needing guarantees. We begin to trust the process, not because we know how everything will turn out, but because we know how we’ll respond when it doesn’t.

This is true in art. It’s true in health. And it’s true in life.

Real stability isn’t found in holding everything together.

It’s found in knowing that even when things shift, you can stay present, keep creating, and move forward with curiosity instead of fear.

So if you’re feeling unsettled right now, unsure, or in between versions of yourself, maybe nothing is wrong.

Maybe you’re simply being invited to join the dance of life.

Thanks for reading.

Brandon Schaefer