From a young age, Mirko has always reached for success. From his Slovenian roots, he gained an admiration of all things honorable, a love for truth, justice and family. His drive to succeed guided him through law school and twenty years of work as a prosecutor before he finally became a partner in an independent firm. In those twenty years, he married a beautiful woman, and together they built a family. They are still together today; their youngest daughter will graduate from college next spring. Mirko was and still is everything one wants for their sons; he is a pillar in the community, earns a very high yearly wage, and a respectable man. His sons have taken after him, becoming successful businessmen and lawyers. Together they work to defend innocent people and seek justice for those wronged. But Mirko has a secret.
Holly is much younger than Mirko, but she shares his values of truth and justice. From a young age, Holly was always active in her community, working alongside her parents and other concerned citizens to do everything possible to better her town. As a teenager, Holly was an avid speech and debate competitor, routinely placing highly in national championships. After her high school graduation, Holly took some time off from community involvement to focus on her degree, as well as to spend a year of intensive study and work in Europe. Holly graduated with a Political Science degree when she was only twenty, and how works part time in a law office, dedicating the rest of her free time to providing hands-on help for disadvantaged, abused, and enslaved women. Her work recently expanded to an international mission, as she now travels to foreign countries to provide support for new help centers. Holly has a secret, too.
Aurelio came to the United States as a refugee. As a four year old boy, his parents had woken him one night to rush to the last open airport on Cuba, racing to leave the country before Castro’s soldiers captured them. Of the blur of memories of Cuba, Aurelio remembers most vividly running across the tarmac, listening to the boom of gunfire as they made one last effort to reach safety. His status as a political refugee offered him little in the way of advantages. He grew up in the slums of New York, having little but his own drive and his mother’s encouragement to finish high school. He battled with post traumatic stress, which a school counselor mis-diagnosed as insanity, then refused to assist his family in providing the proper treatment. He finished high school, then, on his own, worked night and day to put himself through college, eventually managing huge budgets and projects for companies such as Ogilvy. Yet, Aurelio has a secret, too.
Mirko, Holly, Aurelio. Three individuals, that have never met—and, very likely, never will. Yet they all share the same secret. One that they share with thousands of other highly successful people. They are artists. Their pastimes are creative. Mirko draws and works with the theatrical arts. Holly writes stories. Aurelio paints and writes. Whenever they face a problem that they can’t find a solution to, have a bad day, or simply lack motivation, they turn to a blank sheet of paper. Mirko even credits much of his success in the courtroom to the time he spent drawing, finding that the more complicated the case, the more he needed to set aside the case and pick up a pen. If he pushed aside the urge, and soldiered through with his research and arguments, he would lose his case. Thus his art has found a prominent place in his life, even though it would never be his profession.
Mirko is not the only lawyer I know who draws. I know many others. One, a water attorney, cooks gourmet foods. Another writes poems. The phenomenon of successful people being artists isn’t limited to lawyers. Even Albert Einstein would turn to artistic expression when he felt stressed, had a bad day, or couldn’t figure out an equation. He turned to his violin.
I considered all of this as I stared at a textbook. This is the lightest semester I have ever taken, but it is the semester I have struggled the most with my grades. While mulling over my predicament, I go back to my heaviest semester, where I took twenty units at one time. What did I do differently? I spent hours comparing schedules, assignments, and workloads. Everything indicated that I should have better grades this semester than that semester, but I’m struggling to maintain a B in two of my classes, and I have nearly given up hope of doing more than barely passing the third (I carried a 4.0 in my twenty unit semester, by the way).
Finally, I realized. In that huge semester, I had unconsciously worked in artistic outlets. Once a week, I would spend an hour at a coffee shop, killing time between classes. While I was there, I would draw bones. I wrote it off as study time, since every bone I drew was one that I was studying in my labs. At the same time, I spent roughly two hours a week writing stories; that was marked down as homework for an English class. Being a good anthropology student, then, it was time to test my hypothesis. It was time to see if artistic endeavors really did make my grades better.
I started off spending about a half an hour a day writing stories. Some were weird, some didn’t make sense, some were absolutely beautiful and if I showed them to you, you would cry (I won’t show them to you, in the interest of keeping crying at a minimum). I started carrying blank paper around with me, and took advantage of the odd half-hour break I had three times a week. Sometimes I would draw, sometimes I would write. Last week I spent nearly an hour working on a manga Viking. Silly, I know. But I was taking the time to be artistic. The semester isn’t over, but the time I’ve taken to let my imagination run free seems to be giving good results, so much so that I’m confident that I might even get a high B out of my most worrisome class.
It was shortly after this that I walked into work one day to be handed a drawing by Mirko. It was a cartoon of my father, one that he is very pleased with. That was the day I found out that Mirko draws. He had always been the analytical lawyer; I never knew that he drew. That was the moment it began to make sense. Creativity isn’t just about being weird, dressing funny, and throwing paint at a canvas. It is about crafting an expression, working out a solution to a problem that we’ve artificially created for a person that exists nowhere but inside our minds.
I never told my mother about the stories I write. Growing up, I knew she had a strong dislike for fiction, and she still regards it as a waste of time. I know she approves of my drawings, but merely because she finds them “useful”. All my childhood paintings and drawings have disappeared from her house, though the ribbon I won at a State Fair for one of those drawings still hangs visibly. I wonder if she even remembers that that particular ribbon was connected to a cash prize, or if it is merely a subconscious leftover. I don’t know where my other ribbons hang, or if they hang at all. Perhaps they are lost to the dusty corners of my memory.
Don’t get me wrong; I love my mother very much, and I think she gave me the best possible upbringing she could. Yet, sometimes I wish she could feel how I feel when I’ve finished a drawing or a story. It isn’t a feeling of pride, though; it is one of peace and clarity. So the creative balances the analytical, the peace of the one gives way to the solutions of the other, and we begin again, with a new course of study, a new court case, or a new mission in life, knowing that soon, it will need its own story. Perhaps that is why I can never quite write “The End.”
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