No matter what your job is, you’re always serving someone else’s interests. When I build a pamphlet for a business, I endorse their product. When I design a website for a conference, I support the message of the keynote. When a landscaper achieves excellence in stonemasonry, they still condone the client’s desire to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. In the creative enterprise, I sometimes find it challenging to reconcile the full range of perspectives that I serve. But this same diversity also brings with it refreshing, worldview-changing moments.
When I paint a mural for a child, I participate in the love of the family, and the joy and wonder of youth. I can put behind me for a moment, the politics of world-hunger, and simply endorse simple idealistic beauty and truth. This hopeful, idealistic rendering of sea turtles and manta-rays will be for the boy, David, a visual anchor on which he hangs his childhood imagination.
And that (not unlike a day at the beach) is refreshing.