There is a wisdom in creative practice that works in our everyday lives. This thought has been reoccurring in my mind and keeps returning me to an experience I had repeatedly when I was painting.

I would usually paint in the morning. I would put in time on my chosen focus for that day and paint until my energy had dissipated or I had to leave the house to run an errand or go to work. I noticed that every painting session would include something I had mastered in a previous session and some new thing I had discovered. These discoveries were often the result of what I had considered a mistake when it happened.

I would use a color that seemed ideal only to have it clash with everything and have to repaint that section or attempt a wash and find that the paint had run the length of the canvas. These creative mistakes were constant companions of my creative work so that I found myself expecting them. My realization that yesterday’s mistake was a technique to be used in today’s session or a solution to a perplexing creative problem was a surprise to me. This idea of mistakes and errors leading to new creative processes has changed my opinion about mistakes in my life.

I find myself waiting a lot longer before I jump to conclusions about the meaning of something that is taking place in my life. I remember the unanticipated turns in my art and think that the same turns in life can be indicators of new processes in my personal life.

Maybe making art is a form of making life and so the lessons in one apply to the other. The questions, “Is art imitating life,” or, “Is life imitating art?” are probably irrelevant or at least less significant than the lesson that there is a wisdom in each that illuminates both. Remembering this helps me when I’m experiencing challenges in my creative life or personal life because I know I have a way of finding the wisdom to navigate through them, a wisdom based in successful mistakes.