THE PATH TO IKIGAI
Updated: Aug 19
A MAP TO A BALANCED LIFE
I contemplated Ikigai. A Japanese concept so layered it resists a clean translation. "Reason for being" gets you close, but doesn't carry the weight. The diagram does better. Four circles. Four questions. What do you love? What are you good at? What does the world need? What can you be paid for? The concept is displayed in a simple matrix of four ideas, a foundation where all things in one's life align in efficient flow.
At the center, where all four overlap: Ikigai. Not a destination, a convergence. The balance of positive attributes as a life philosophy, mapped to a schematic. This was UX designed for your life. My game design mind was already at work. Would it be possible to actually take this diagram seriously? Could one map a path to Ikigai, find balance, and reach the center where a better life was waiting? The idea of this balance was nothing new, but the actual path was now coming into focus.
YOUR THING
We all know what our thing is. The moment we keep returning to throughout our lives like an old friend. Something that we love to do, or an experience done in habitual repetition. When it comes to business, the question of what one loves does not have to be entirely beside the point. If one has the luck in life to know what their thing is and it happens to fit into a vocation, is it a business plan? Just maybe.
Mapping that plan is how we navigate our lives from the very beginning in the design of our individual stories. There just might be a way for one to sail, or knit, or nurture their way into that place of balance for themselves. What are they willing to let go of in order to do so? To travel the many paths, hidden, difficult and disguised, the way that they must go, guided by whispered voices of muses or the roar of monsters. We become our own Sherpas, in the act of charting the way forward.
For me, the answer to "what do you love?" has always been clear. Creativity has always been my thing. I have spent my entire life pursuing the craft of being a commercial artist, and in that pursuit discovered a world where my skills would always be applied to someone else's subject matter. I had proven that I could be and in fact was a "professional" artist. However, when applied through the lens of a job, the art was never my own. I needed to reverse the narrative. What if I switched roles and instead, "hired" myself as the architect, the visionary, making something that I loved into a plan suggested by the concept of Ikigai.
Returning to the diagram reminded me to quiet the commercial art machine within, and remember; what does the world need? Not what the market will pay for, but what the world actually needs. This question was the fulcrum that led to the inception of Studio Tsubo. The answer would need to be universal, a concept that transcended time and culture. Something that anyone could relate to as resoundingly positive. The answer was nature. Everyone loves scenes of natural beauty. Everyone is part of the Biosphere.
I imagined the worlds I had been making for decades in video games. Could the digital realms I'd been sculpting become realized in ceramic, where I could continue making scenes of drama, designs that merge philosophic notions with paths of adventure, inspiring the imagination outside of the games industry? I love sending people on a journey, giving them the joy of contemplative discovery. And the thought: what if in that moment, a person could find clarity leading to their own positive change in the world? Of sending people on a daily walk in the garden. Growing something and thinking about ecology and flow, of nutrients and photosynthesis, of the requirements needed for something to prosper and seeing it all unfold through the doing of it.
THE MISSION
Making life better is where nature and art come together to give way to clarity, flow and inner peace. The ancient art form of Penjing is the art of the living scene. A tray, a stone, a plant, arranged not as mere decoration but as an evocative diorama. A tale told in miniature, composed with the same intention a painter brings to a canvas. Though, unlike a painting, it grows, it changes, it responds to care, and flourishes with a guiding hand.
That ancient tradition has become my platform. The tradition of Penjing reimagined as fully realized sculpted dioramas, with all the storytelling elements waiting to be connected by the gardener through the act of planting and completing the miniature scenes. For urban gardeners who've lost access to land, this is an offer to return. A way to grow a living landscape on a windowsill, a balcony, or a shelf. Penjing, reinterpreted for the city dweller who needs a place within nature to experience the reciprocal gift of cultivating something beautiful and, in turn, being rewarded with a scene of natural grace.
When I think of the human impression on the ecosystem, how we make our mark is symbolized in the form of a brick, an icon of what being human is, and proof that the forms shaped by the human hand can be integrated with allegiance to the ecosystem. Ceramic material acts as marrow and bone, providing flow and structure. It holds the form of our impressions, becoming malleable while never quite leaving the natural world.
The brick as a style guide created by my own hand is my effort to build the path one scene at a time, each a living vessel sent out into the world to be completed by another in my effort to make life better through art, science and nature.