More on Thomas Moore + having a thick skin

I am familiarizing myself with Thomas Moore -- I haven't read any of his books yet but am open to recommendations if you have. As a first effort, I wandered over to his website and started poking around at his blog posts. "Molding the Raw Material of the Soul" on the Huffington Post caught my attention. Particularly I like the section where he says everyone needs counseling, and a certain amount of counseling is needed for every job.

This is bemusing to me, especially when at art shows there are always a certain number of people who say to me that they want to do art shows too. I always offer them counseling. Not that I'm trained, but I have a bit of experience. I'm not a negative person, either, so it's not that I want to scare them off. It's just that I have a certain number of friends who do shows who get seriously hurt when sales don't happen or people just walk by their booth. All jobs take a certain amount of thick skin, and as an independent artist you have to think about all the jobs you have -- artist, bookkeeper, shipping & distributing, retail sales, wholesale sales, online sales, blogger, driver, greeter, decorator, etc. etc. -- and wonder if your skin is thick enough for not one but all of those jobs.

Then on top of it all, to adopt a bit of Moore's mindset, you then have to wonder if all of this -- this huge lifestyle choice -- is what will actually feed your soul. It can be truly gratifying. Most days my soul wins out over my mind. Then some days I forget to listen to my soul until it's too late. It's all an interesting learning experience.

If you haven't clicked over to Moore's blog post yet, he also has some great things to say about aging. He looks at life as a learning experience, as a maturing process... and how that just deepens life as you get older because you are building a foundation for yourself. I've always liked this vision of a strong solid base, and it's one that I've used for myself over the past few years when life felt rocky yet I realized I was learning and adding to my foundation, which felt much more comforting.