Trust, Love, Hope, and The Function of Art & Design SEUNG CHAN LIM slim@realizingempathy.com 9th revision as of 01/31/2012
Trust, Love, Hope, and The Function of Art & Design Preface to Realizing Empathy
The past 4 months have been a time of intense reflection. When I finished the book, I felt a temporary sense of coherence. I enjoyed it. Immensely. After all, that’s what I wanted out of the experience of writing it. But I knew that it wouldn’t last. It never does. And sure enough, there was soon a lingering feeling in the back of my mind that I was missing something. And of course I was.
Trust, Love, Hope Contrary to the sequence I use in the book to present my work, the word TRUST entered into my model at the tail end of my research. As a matter of fact, up until the very last moment, I had used the words safety and comfort instead of trust. You could almost say that I had thought of the word trust merely because safety and comfort sounded too weak. But after I had completed the book, I had a chance to conduct another interview with Dr. Lewis Lipsitt1. Toward the end of our interview we digressed to talking about why some people are able to lead fulfilling and satisfying lives despite hardship, while some that enjoy abundance fail to do so. And he said something quite remarkable. He said that whether or not someone develops a strong sense of trust in others and the world at large can have a great deal of impact in deciding this factor. I was puzzled. What did a sense of trust have anything to do with living a fulfilling life? But since the topic was a digression, I left it at that and quickly returned to the main thread. On my drive back home, the idea kept bothering me like a thorn stuck in the back of my throat. What did trust have to do with leading a fulfilling life? I suppose it would make the person a nice person for giving others her trust, and that may make them feel good about themselves... but what else? Then for reasons I can’t remember, I must have briefly thought in Korean instead of English, because 1
The first interview can be found on page 110 - 153 of the first edition of Realizing Empathy
I suddenly recalled a phrase I had heard over and over again as a child: “믿음, 소망, 사랑 그중에 제일은 사랑이요,” which roughly translates to “trust, hope, love: greatest among them, love”. And with that, it became clear that I’ve known the answer all along.
The Oscillation If your experience is anything like mine, life is filled with the feeling of uncertainty. Thankfully, there are also moments of certainty. By and large, it is the OSCILLATION between the two feelings that creates the MOMENTUM of this pendulum we call L I FE . Given what Dr. Lipsitt said about trust, I am now compelled to qualify this feeling of certainty as a manifestation of a deep sense of trust in my own understanding of the world. And this need not be the whole world, but merely a portion of it. For example, music was what I trusted the most when I was an insecure college student struggling with everything from academics to social life. When I felt betrayed and scarred by people, music was something I could count on to be there for me when I needed it. It spoke to me when I was down, and I spoke to it when I needed someone that would listen. It was the only thing I felt comfortable crying in front of without feeling embarrassed. To add to the variety, there was also a time when the computer was a source of certainty for me. Perhaps this is an experience unique to hackers, but once I became sufficiently conversant with the computer using languages such as assembly and C, I was not only able to specify exactly what I wanted it to do, but also predict― to a certain degree―how it would behave in response
to my requests. This gave me a tremendous sense of trust in the computer, and I was hooked. There’s no doubt in my mind that depending on your capacity to engage in empathic conversations, what you may consider a subject of trust can be limitless. But no matter what you trust, what’s important is that you must trust something in order to have your moments of certainty, to oscillate the pendulum of life. But trust alone is not enough, either. Or rather, I should say that unilateral trust is not enough. What we need is trust that is reciprocated. Because without reciprocation, I don’t know how long we will be able to sustain the trust. One form of reciprocation is confirmation. You trust that the floor will not vanish when you put down your foot, and sure enough it does not. Fantastic. But there is another more empowering form of reciprocation, and that is an equal or greater act of trust by the subject of your trust. An act that requires the other to take a risk of relatively substantial magnitude. What emerges in the presence of such reciprocal relationship is quite possibly the most powerful force known to mankind. And that force... is LOVE .
Our First Addiction? Now please don’t confuse the word love with romance. That’s not what I mean. I don’t just mean love between two human beings, either. What I mean is the sensation you feel when you act in trust, and you receive an act of trust in return. It is a sense of belonging. A sense that you’re not alone. A sense of deeply connected one-ness.
A sense that what you do matters to others. A sense that your life has meaning. A sense that gives you self-worth and self-confidence. A sense that, above all, gives you HOPE . Hope of good things to come. Why? Because
something good has already come. The sense of belonging. The sense of one-ness. The sense of self-worth. The sense of self-confidence. Didn’t they feel good? So who is to say that we won’t get to feel more of it? Perhaps it’s possible to feel something even better! Who knows? So why not stay alive to find out? Why not have FAITH ? Seen in this light, love is an emergent property of life, and life is an emergent property of love, as life becomes a series of oscillations fueled by the force of love. A force that empowers you to fully realize your potential in the same way that your dance partner's bold amplification of your timid movement empowers it to realize its full intimate potential. This is life not as a pursuit toward reproduction, but reproduction as a means of bettering one’s chances of giving and receiving love―and quite possibly the strongest love of them all. In this sense, there is no single objective that drives your life forward. If anything, you’re driven by curiosity, fueled by a sense of hope originating from having both enough COURAGE to trust that you can form a deep understanding of all that you encounter, and enough HUMILITY
to trust that there is value in acting on that
assumption, that the knowledge you have of them is insufficient, that the world is infinitely more interesting than you can ever imagine. But as I demonstrate in the book, the very act of understanding is an act of EMPATHIC CONVERSATION , which is about
creating meaningful connections with the world. Once again, it’s about our yearning for love. To be quite honest, it is unclear to me whether to think of this yearning as a developed addiction or an innate compass. Is a baby’s first smile a sign of her addiction to love? Does it start in the womb? Or is it in the DNA ? I don’t know. What I do know is that this yearning for love is often expressed vividly by singers and actors on stage. We often say that their performance is soulful. It is an undeniable witnessing of an other’s yearning for love. You can sure as hell feel it resonate deep within, because you have it in you as well. What if what we call our soul is our yearning for love? Isn’t this the essential expression of what it means to be a human being? Isn’t it the gravity of our existence? One that encompasses the paradoxical nature of our
existence, full of pain and vulnerability, yet energized with joy and confidence?
Love and its Opposite Michael Shurtleff, one of the most preeminent American casting directors of all time, says in his landmark book Audition that to act out a scene, an actor must ask herself a simple question “What am I fighting for?” In each of the scenes we act in this play called life, we’re fighting for love. Plain and simple. We can either live accepting or die rejecting. Accepting this idea would obviously make us intensely vulnerable. Very few would publicly announce their acceptance of such an idea. But when I look at people who have touched the hearts of millions, it’s not too difficult to imagine that they have long embraced this idea. Because if there is anything I’ve learned in the past 3 years, it’s that an honest expression of the self is the only way to profound resonance. And there is every reason to believe that those who touch the hearts of millions are doing their very best to be honest with themselves―even if they may never achieve it. But if you do not embrace your yearning for love why would you want to be so deeply honest with yourself? If you do not wish for profound resonance, why would you give the kind of trust necessary to share your vulnerably honest self with the rest of the world? Let’s not sugar coat things here. If you have ever tried to create a piece of art work that exposes who you are, you know how lonely it can feel, how scary and painful it can
be. As a matter of fact, it took me all my life to come to the realization that the opposite of being loved is dying. Because there is a distinct possibility that you will get sufficiently hurt in this process, that you will not receive an act of reciprocal trust. And as a result, you may stop trusting, which will deprive you of any opportunity to feel a sense of love. Worse yet, make you gradually lose any hope of ever doing so. I don’t know if you’ve had any personal experience with those with depression, but this is very much what happens with people experiencing severe depression. It is a helpless, helpless feeling. A feeling that you are completely and utterly alone. And to make matters worse, it feels as though there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. It is devastating. So devastating that taking your own life seems like a logical choice. And many do. The reason why we have great respect for people like Steve Jobs (he comes to mind because he passed away recently), Oscar Wilde (he comes to mind because I recently went to see a fabulous production of the play Gross Indecency) or Richard Feynman (he comes to mind because he is a personal hero) is not because they were able to produce great things, but that they fought for love until the day they died. Were they saints? No. They were human beings. They were capable of hurting others just like the rest of us. Given their scale of influence, they may have hurt more than many of us. What makes them remarkable and surprising as human beings is that they managed to channel their insatiable yearning for love through passion, rather than grudge―can you imagine what kind of mass destruction
can occur when that same energy is channeled through grudge? Not only that, but they did it despite the tremendous sense of loneliness that accompanies such feat. To keep such a high-amplitude oscillation going, you must give an extraordinary amount of trust in yourself and in others in your immediate circle. It is a daunting COMMITMENT . It’s unclear to me if this is even sufficient.
Many I know find energy in imagining the reciprocating trust of a large group of audience in the distant future to be able to keep such a high-amplitude oscillation going, to keep trusting, to keep living. One could even argue that the only people who would yearn for this much love are those that have had a traumatic experience as a child. If that’s true, I’d say that makes them even more remarkable.
Why ask Why? To be frank, this is not the kind of realization I was expecting to come to when I was a 29 year old software engineer asking that quintessential question one seems to ask before the age of 30: “Why am I doing what I am doing?” I left for art school seeking enlightenment, and I thought I’d eventually arrive at some grand purpose, a grand cause to fight for the greater good of humanity: something to make my life seem amazing and worthwhile. After all, the motto I lived my twenties by was “to change the world.” Clearly my thirties should be guided by something even greater! But instead, what I ended
up realizing was the intensely fragile nature of what it means to be a human being. What it means to trust. What it means to feel loved. What it means to hope. What it means... to be alive. Yet I somehow feel relieved. I feel relieved to know that there doesn’t have to be an answer to the “why?” question. Because what Dr. Lipsitt taught me is that the function of that question isn’t to get an answer. Instead, it is to give anyone who dares to ask the question a deep sense of trust. A deep sense of trust that you can and will find an answer. It is what starts the cycle of trust, love, and hope. It is the first sign that you have made a conscious decision to CARE about your life, to promise to fight for love, to embrace what it means to be a human being. That is what trust has to do with leading a fulfilling life. Nothing more. Nothing less.
The Function of Art & Design I spent the last 3 years at an art school, conducting research into how the act of making works and why we do it. I started off by making things with paper and clay, followed by type, wood, metals, glass, plastic, and light. After realizing the importance of the body as physical material, I started acting and dancing as well. What I realized from this experience is that the act of making is not about creativity or innovation, but rather a challenge to empathize with the integrity of others: be it a character in a play, a fellow actor, a piece of wood, a dancer, or even your own body. Others we often think we know, but really have no idea.
What we ultimately gain from making, is not merely a thing, or the experience of making, but also a deep sense of trust in ourselves and in others that make up the world at large. We gain a source of love. We gain a reason to live another day. And when what we make invites others to engage in the same kind of empathic conversation, it can also become a subject of their trust. It can become their source of love. It can give them hope. It can give them a reason to live another day. As simple and as powerful as that can be, that seems to be the function of art. What pains me to no end is that this is missing in many of the products and services that we as designers are producing now. Perhaps this is because many of us are so quick to separate art from design. I can’t even count how many times I’ve heard fellow designers say that art is self-indulgent and design is noble. That art has no function whereas design does. Does the fact that a hammer can ram a nail into the wall make it more functional than a piece of novel that makes you realize that you’re not alone? How about a play that achieves a sense of resonance so profound that it puts you in touch with your own sense of honesty? How about a sculpture that makes you marvel at its construction and humbles you to realize that there is still so much you can learn? In the end, no matter what you produce as a designer, be it a chair, a piece of software, a book, a service, an organization, a building, a city, if they do not become the subjects of our trust, if they do not reciprocate adequately to our own acts of trust, if they do not empower us to make love, have hope, and keep faith, if they do not
give us a reason to sustain our lives, to live another day, to develop the humility and courage necessary to be honest with ourselves, to understand who we were, to be who we are and to become who we dream, we have not ďŹ nished our job. Because design without art is incomplete. Once again, I thank everyone who has made my graduate school experience what it turned out to be. Thank you. Stay Beautiful. Always.
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