True Life vs Real Life.

Real vs True

When my son Nicholas was quite young, he would refer to reality or real life, as true life. I always thought this was an amusing mis-titling of the word real and some other cute nomenclatures he and his sister Camille coined. Nozzle for the end of the baguette and gloomers for the light dimmers, among others. Recently, in relaying this story to a fellow attendee at the DO lectures, they saw a distinction between true and real life: real life is the reality of our day-to-day existence, and true life is being more true to yourself, a higher calling maybe? I suppose simply being more true to oneself. For me, this is definitely about stepping into my creativity.

This has me pondering. Is there a distinction between the two? And if so, is there an overlap?

For most of my career, I was an architect and an artist, but these roles seemed to live in different realms. Architecture was my day job, and despite some grand aspirations, a lot of the work that I did was the reality of my day-to-day life — real life. Whereas my painting seems to express my creativity and, in many ways, possibly my true life.

But the thing was that I set up practice in 1991, in the middle of the recession we had to have, mostly because it was the only job I could find. I rented a corner of my mate Colin Loels’s office and had no work for the first 6 months. I had also rented part of…