What have you done to make a difference in someone's life in the past three days?

As we grow older, it becomes harder to feel the mystery and wonder we had as children.  It is not, however, a result of having grown out of the need for desire for mystery and wonder; it is, rather, that adults have far more practical experience.  Practical experience answers questions, and it also implants fear, worry, jealousy, and other negative emotions.  Adults become so wrapped up in the day-to-day that they push out mystery and wonder.

Many people believe that children have some special ability to appreciate mystery and feel wonder, but that is untrue.  Children simply have no bills to pay, no work life to balance, comparatively weak social pressures, and little imagination when it comes to "things that can go wrong and leave us homeless and hungry".  Adults have the exact same ability they always had, but their mystery is "How will I make it through the end of the month?" and their wonder is "I wonder if that spot is cancer?"

What adults need to do is to cultivate the mystery and wonder they once felt and use it to live a more exciting inner life.  One way we are helping to instill this kind of mystery and wonder in random adults is through The Tiny Art Project.

The Tiny Art Project is where we create tiny pieces of art, any medium, and putting it into tiny frames (2" or smaller.)  These tiny frames can be pinned or stuck in unlikely public places where adults can see the art, appreciate the beauty, wonder how it was made, and marvel in the mystery of how it got there and why anyone would do such a thing.

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I was always envious of bands that shot to stardom.  Comics who landed on Saturday Night Live.  Actors who won an Oscar on their first movies.  Assholes.

I realized later that these "overnight successes" weren't really.  These were people who worked and slaved unrewarded for years, decades before finding fame and glory.  The "sudden" part was only my perspective.  I began hating instead people who made home videos that went viral, lottery winners and fortune inheritors.  Those were the undeserving twats.

I mostly hated them while I was in my slaving away years.  Who every knows if your unpaid work will ever pay off.  A creative art isn't like working your way up in a company.  In a company, you get paid no matter what you do.  When you're working in a creative art, you practice and practice and work at your craft completely unpaid and unrecognized without any inkling if it will pay off eventually at all.

Standing in my crappy apartment surrounded by crumpled notes and a beat to hell drum set I was the asshole.  All my parents' disheartening advice was sneaking back into my brain, this time betraying me even more by using my own voice to say it.

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A woman stood in the art gallery, her back to the large windows facing the street. Her weight was on her left hip and her body made a slight curve. Her hair was not long, nor was it short. Her clothes were gender-generic and neutral in color. The woman stood still for long moments before suddenly shifting her feet or pushing on her hair and returning to her neutral, if slightly bent, position.

The art was blurry from a distance. Smears of color washed in art gallery spotlight. Small squares of canvas were dwarfed by large expanses of pristine white walls. There were no frames.