Big magic: creative living beyond fear - Elizabeth Gilbert 2015

Decorate Yourself
Permission

Ihave a neighbor who gets tattoos all the time.

Her name is Eileen. She acquires new tattoos the way I might acquire a new pair of cheap earrings—just for the heck of it, just on a whim. She wakes up some mornings in a funk and announces, “I think I’ll go get a new tattoo today.” If you ask Eileen what kind of tattoo she’s planning on getting, she’ll say, “Oh, I dunno. I’ll figure it out when I get to the tattoo shop. Or I’ll just let the artist surprise me.”

Now, this woman is not a teenager with impulse-control issues. She’s a grown woman, with adult children, who runs a successful business. She’s also very cool, uniquely gorgeous, and one of the most free spirits I’ve ever met. When I asked her once how she could allow her body to be marked up so casually with permanent ink, she said, “Oh, but you misunderstand! It’s not permanent. It’s just temporary.”

Confused, I asked, “You mean, all your tattoos are temporary?”

She smiled and said, “No, Liz. My tattoos are permanent; it’s just my body that’s temporary. So is yours. We’re only here on earth for a short while, so I decided a long time ago that I wanted to decorate myself as playfully as I can, while I still have time.”

I love this so much, I can’t even tell you.

Because—like Eileen—I also want to live the most vividly decorated temporary life that I can. I don’t just mean physically; I mean emotionally, spiritually, intellectually. I don’t want to be afraid of bright colors, or new sounds, or big love, or risky decisions, or strange experiences, or weird endeavors, or sudden changes, or even failure.

Mind you, I’m not going to go out and cover myself with tattoos (simply because that doesn’t happen to be my jam), but I am going to spend as much time as I can creating delightful things out of my existence, because that’s what brings me awake and that’s what brings me alive.

I do my decorating with printer ink, not with tattoo ink. But my urge to write comes from exactly the same place as Eileen’s urge to turn her skin into a vivid canvas while she’s still here.

It comes from a place of Hey, why not?

Because it’s all just temporary.