I Left the Rat Race

Daily art prompts. Today’s: “Dream a Little Dream.” I just drew and wrote what came to mind. It became instantly cathartic. Since March, I have lost a friend to a heart attack, my father to lung cancer and discovered a loved one is a severe alcoholic. This has brought to the fore some unsavory childhood memories. The spate of mass shootings in the past couple of days is also disturbing.
But art and writing are centering me.

“If you had everything in the material world (ambition, power, money), would that bring you happiness?
Go back in time when you got something you really wanted. Were you happy? How long did it last?
You can be happy without anything achieved through ambition. So why not skip that step and just be joyous?”
-Byron Katie

The absence of “things” can bring great peace and actually buy you time and energy. As the author of Goodbye, Things says,
“To let go is not to lose but to gain. When you let go, something new will inevitably come and fill in the empty space you created.”
-Fumio Sasaki, Goodbye Things