Remarkable things happen when you allow yourself to become fully engaged with creating art or performing music. At every level, you learn how little things make big things happen. The arts allow you to experience things from a global perspective and to bring real world meaning to basic knowledge and skills.
When you’re open to the artistic process, you can learn to expand the meaning you get from your experiences and transfer that knowledge to other situations. This is knowledge that can help you gain a deeper understanding of a variety of experiences in your daily life.
Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.
~ Vincent Van Gogh
Here are three examples of big ideas that come from little things in the artistic process and how that knowledge can be transferred to everyday experiences to create a more fulfilling life.
- Everything is constantly and permanently connected. In the arts, you learn to experiment with the smallest elements—to see and hear how to make adjustments—so they work most effectively together to create a whole. In today’s complex world, this same process is necessary as we negotiate the complex social, economic and political links between people and the impact that even the smallest changes have on society as a whole.
- Patterns that exist in music and art help us see relationships. In an artistic experience, you gain an understanding of how patterns formed from the smallest elements create working relationships that function most effectively together. This experience can inspire an appreciation for patterns in everyday life experiences. You can use that knowledge to build and maintain positive and trusting relationships. It can help people make peace and resolve conflicts, leading one to value human rights and social justice.
- Everything can work together even if in different ways. All of the elements in creating art or making music work together to create a unified whole, but they do so in different ways. What an incredible lesson this is for gaining a deeper understanding of one’s self and culture and the contributions of those from other cultures.