Mark Nepo

Exploring there is not that, well, now that I'm retired, I can paint more or I can write more.

What I'm exploring there is our life is the work of art.

And by immersing ourselves, by devoting ourselves, we take our place in the mystery of life.

We live as fully as we can.

As holding nothing back, our relationships become a work of art.

And so another lesson from my father, which I learned a lot because he was a creative force as a master woodworker.

And he built a 30-foot sailboat catch when I was a boy out of wood that I spent a lot of my youth on.

And so I didn't learn a lot by him talking about creativity, just by watching him.

And I remember being 10 or 11 and we had a small home on Long Island and the basement was where his workshop was.

And he was working because one of the things he would do as a hobby as well was he would carve half models.

So what he would do is he would get blueprints for sailing ships from the 1800s and then he would build them to scale, maybe six foot long.

And they were half models because you would only build half

And so you can mount them on a wall.

So part of it was flat.

And I remember watching him through the see-through stairs of the basement and he was immersed in with a tweezer with black thread, pulling two scale rigging through the masts and the, that what were dead eyes were turnbuckles.

They call them now today.

And he didn't know I was watching him and I didn't know what it meant, but I've come to understand.

he was showing me the secret life of detail this goes back to dealing with the one thing that's in front of you and i learned that he was so immersed and this is interesting given what i learned by attending him when he was in his last years there in the hospital but back then he was so immersed that he was in the moment of everyone who ever built a boat

And so while the work he did was excellent, it's about immersion, not excellence.

Excellence is the byproduct of immersion.