*Art as a means to achieve personal satisfaction and tranquility in the midst of the pandemic.*
Personal satisfaction is a state of well-being where the feeling of comfort and emotional comfort is a goal that very few people achieve permanently and lastingly, in such a case, we seek to feel satisfaction in our lives, a "something" that gives us the joy of living, that makes us feel satisfied and pleasant in harmony with our environment.
In the midst of this accumulation of sensations and emotional states, the arts are presented as an instrument capable of achieving that feeling of "personal satisfaction" in a sense where we are placed as creative entities, gods capable of shaping the elements to give life or impregnate with life what we create and therefore when we come into contact with all the creative processes we give life to an idea and we put all our effort into it.
Aristotle said that "the purpose of art is to give body to the secret essence of things, not to copy their appearance", giving us with this a definition close to the concept of art by telling us that art is a way of revealing the true form of things through a representation elaborated with materials chosen by the one who interprets or rather, reinterprets it.
During the whole creative process the artist uses his ingenuity to give form to that essence, and thus extract and materialize it, it is at this point where art becomes a historical record of the events of humanity and a therapeutic resource due to the intimate contact that the artist has with himself, hence each artistic construction has something of himself so it can be said that art being an encounter with the psyche of the one who creates has a meditative effect due to its high degree of concentration.
It is no coincidence that the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung thought that achieving a state of personal satisfaction is given by the ability to look inward to become individuals and be part of the world from our being, awakening the "I" and thereby developing the features of our personality, something that through art can be achieved due to the interrelationship individual-process-creation, as gods who play at recreating life. The awakening of the true "I", that which interacts with the rest of the world, making it his own, leads him to understand that he is part of a whole and with this he is part of the same world that surrounds him, merging into one, understanding himself within it, finding himself and therefore, finding meaning to his existence through his recreation, which is nothing more than the exploitation of his ego.
Personal satisfaction is achieved with each artistic production that has as its meaning the mere expression of the senses, especially when in the midst of the adversities experienced (as in this case with the pandemic), art is taken as a means to overcome them and get out of the mental and emotional chaos even situations that can become traumatic and to understand that it is part of a whole, the individual can find welfare and feel comfortable to share their achievements in this social dynamic that makes with their environment, not to seek comfort in adversity, but as part of that cycle where I "let off steam" and show the results of that process without pretending more than to show my achievements, to share them with others and make them part of our process.
Now, the pandemic has opened a gap to be resilient, to be like the phoenix that reborns, rebuilds and takes better advantage of this adverse situation, it has been an instrument to re-invent ourselves as human beings, exploring our capabilities and overcome day by day what we live and in the process achieve personal satisfaction, therefore, we must open ourselves to the diverse possibilities that the arts in general offer us, give ourselves fully and find solace in the arms of the nine muses of mythology or in the essence of the elements that we use to create, to find what we call personal satisfaction and spiritual tranquility.
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Article written by: Nadia Padrón (@hojaraskita)
In times of pandemic, unleashing creativity is a good way to drain the stress of an unusual situation.