There has been a silly trivia tidbit floating around the internet in recent years. No doubt you have seen a meme or two of a gigantic lobster with a caption claiming that lobsters, if left undisturbed, are biologically immortal. This claim, while untrue, is completely understandable. Lobsters do not age in the way humans and most other animals do. They don’t lower their reproductive ability, their metabolism doesn’t slow, nor do they decrease in strength. In essence, while a human being hits a certain point where we stop growing and start decaying, a lobster continues to grow until the day it dies.
While we cannot hope, at the moment, to harness the lobster’s gifts for continuous growth in a physical sense, perhaps we can learn something about our creative lives. What if we lived our lives with the mindset that our best work was always ahead of us? I think at some point, usually around the general “retirement” age, most people take a seat on the bench and vow that their work is done. It seems silly to me though, that after a lifetime of lessons and learning, that we would not use our wisest years, when our schedule is most open, to create our best work.**
Take a lesson from the lobster. Let us view our creative lives not as an inverted U where we reach a peak in our mid-fifties and spend the rest of our lives decaying, but as a steady climb to the top of a mountain that has no peak, just better work with each step we take.
While we cannot hope, at the moment, to harness the lobster’s gifts for continuous growth in a physical sense, perhaps we can learn something about our creative lives. What if we lived our lives with the mindset that our best work was always ahead of us? I think at some point, usually around the general “retirement” age, most people take a seat on the bench and vow that their work is done. It seems silly to me though, that after a lifetime of lessons and learning, that we would not use our wisest years, when our schedule is most open, to create our best work.**
Take a lesson from the lobster. Let us view our creative lives not as an inverted U where we reach a peak in our mid-fifties and spend the rest of our lives decaying, but as a steady climb to the top of a mountain that has no peak, just better work with each step we take.
**Yes, there are those diagnosed with degenerative diseases that attack the mind making continued growth impossible. But for the rest of us, what’s our excuse?
