Transformation from the Ashes
Posted on April 07, 2022 by Barbara Bell, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
We can learn much about ourselves and even find unexpected gifts and opportunities when difficulties or disasters come our way.
I read recently about a visual artist who lost ten years of artistic production in a devastating studio fire that he accidentally set himself.
Visual artist Tom de Freston’s obsessive perfectionism drove him to use a blow torch to make “one last improvement” to a work, and accidentally set it on fire. The fire quickly engulfed everything, destroying in a matter of minutes the works he had been collaborating on with two others for four years, along with everything else in the studio. Everything, up in smoke. Reduced to ashes.
While we don’t ordinarily experience catastrophes of this magnitude, we do know what it feels like to make a mistake and have our metaphorical world collapse. How do we forgive ourselves? How will we carry on when it seems there’s nothing that can be done to rescue the situation? Or maybe it’s not something we did that caused the walls to come crashing down. How do we see beyond the rubble? How do we pick ourselves up and move forward?
Interestingly, de Freston found a way to not only rescue something from the ashes, but to expand his self-understanding in such a way that the fire seems now like a gift. In fact, he learned that he could transform the charred bits of wooden stretcher bars and crumbling canvas, and even the ashes, and in so doing make an even more profound artistic contribution.
He decided to keep the fragments and ashes from the disaster, and found that they “were feeding and forming everything [he] was making…” He began to make art in a new way, a more thoughtful and patient way, recognizing that he still has the inclination to be obsessive and hasty, and counteracting it by remaining in the current moment with calm. He learned to recognize that the obsessiveness had driven both his successes and his failures, and that the fire had provided a catalyst to reframe everything in his life. The awareness of his own perfectionism and drive opened him to transformation of his way of being in the world and of practicing his art. In that sense, he recognized that these personal foibles of brain wiring, and the fire itself, have been gifts.
We don’t need to ‘burn down the house’ to create change, but we can use our set-backs as an invitation to explore and better understand how we have been functioning and actually make a gift and opportunity out of a catastrophe.
