Make Waves! You’ve probably seen the work of Katsushika Hokusai even if you don’t recognize his name. If you don’t know who he is, I don’t blame you. I just found out this artist’s name by Googling it since I wanted to find out more about the imagery of a wave that I’ve seen many time over in my travels. I’m referring of course to a piece called “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”. You might not even recognize the name of the piece either until you associate it with the actual image.
Now you might recognize it! This is Hokusai’s most famous and one of the best recognized works of Japanese art in the world that depicts an enormous wave threatening boats off the coast of the prefecture of Kanagawa. Many Western collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the British Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and in Claude Monet’s house in Giverny, France, among many other collections, contain impressions of this print.
Hokusai, some years before his death, is reported to have stated: “At the age of five years I had the habit of sketching things. At the age of fifty I had produced a large number of pictures, but for all that, none of them had any merit until the age of seventy. At seventy-three finally I learned something about the true nature of things, birds, animals, insects, fish, the grasses and the trees. So at the age of eighty years I will have made some progress, at ninety I will have penetrated the deepest significance of things, at a hundred I will make real wonders and at a hundred and ten, every point, every line, will have a life of its own” Quite a contrast to the attitudes of today’s modern human who is predisposed into expecting everything happening in an instant. In today’s attention deficit disorder-ly world, the need for things to happen in an instant is of paramount importance. You can’t miss a beat or the chance to make an impact. We have invented every means possible to cater to that mentality. Amazon, the largest online shopping merchant, delivers our orders the next day or even the same day as long as we’re willing to pay for the extra speedy delivery. Social media delivers snippets of our every waking moment in real-time. Snapchat gives us tidbits of moments we consider worth sharing. Tinder caters to our need for serial hook-ups. The message is clear. If you want to succeed in today’s social media-driven instant gratification world, you need to step up your game. You need to learn to ride the wave first and start creating your own waves that will make an impact. Read the story of Make Waves Collective and ask yourself the question -- “Is what I’m doing making an impact in other people’s lives? Am I merely existing as opposed to living life to the fullest?”