Interview with Claudia Biçen (artist and designer)

Claudia Biçen is an artist and designer interested in themes of transience, meaning, and purpose. She collaborated on the creative initiative “Life. Death. Whatever,” and has always been transfixed by the question “how should we live?”

Thoughts in Passing

Claudia is the artist behind “Thoughts in Passing,” a portrait and story collection of northern California hospice patients.

What did you find was most meaningful to the hospice patients you interviewed for this project? What about their lives did they most enjoy reflecting on?

At the end of the project, when I reflected on everything that had been shared, what was most meaningful to these patients were the ways in which they had participated in the world. The ways they had connected with people and places and the things they had created. To me, participating and creating and connecting are all modes of self-transcendence, ways to expand the self or connect to the world beyond the self. That can take so many different forms - connecting with family, making an art project, or even caring for a car collection. I think, at its core, meaning-making is ultimately the different forms of self-transcendence.

What they most enjoyed reflecting on were relationships and all the small things that had made up their lives. They loved to tell stories – stories that had taken on a mythological nature because they’d been told so many times that they came to be the stories of one’s life. But certainly relationships become so, so central. Which makes sense in the context of this idea of self-transcendence: who were the people you touched and who will remember you when you leave?

Equally as important, what was not meaningful? Are there things we spend our lives pursuing that have little value in the end?

For me it was often the things people didn’t talk about that spoke to what was meaningless. Anything around the self or ego – making a lot of money, or status-driven activities like having a big career. The flipside of creation and self-transcendence is consumption and ego, and that’s what stood out as having little value in the end. Consumption into the self, or this increased idea of self (which of course is so core to our culture), anything within this theme tended not to come up in conversation. It simply wasn’t important. 

You’ve summed up one of your most important lessons from this project as “meaning does not come from consumption, but creation.” Could you elaborate on that?

I think at its core it’s another way of saying that meaning doesn’t come from what you take from the world, it comes from what you give. And I think that is so salient when you’re talking to people at the end of their lives, because what they took becomes completely unimportant. What they consumed and used of the world just doesn’t matter. It takes on an irrelevancy. And this comes back to this idea of meaning being so much about creation. Meaningfulness at its core is a creative act, especially creating connection.

Tell me what you mean when you say “we die as ourselves,” and why you initially found this revelation distressing?

It’s funny when this first dawned on me I thought this is so silly, everyone must know this, how did I not realize it? But maybe these are the most powerful personal revelations, when they feel so simple and so obvious. So when I say we die as ourselves, for me it was this realization that I had gone into this project seeking deep wisdom from people who were dying. I had thought that at the end of our lives, perhaps we all sort of reached an awakening, or moment of clarity, or some sort of realization about the nature of reality. And I think what I found instead was much more humbling in many ways, and it was that the people I talked to were still concerned with the same things they’d been concerned with throughout their lives, still grappling with the same questions. They were the same people they’d always been. The realization for me was oh, when I die it’s not going to be some sort of far off, distant version of me, it’s going to be me. I’m going to die as me, with my same lens on the world, my same inner struggles, and my same sort of consciousness. It sounds so simple, and eventually for me this turned out to be really hopeful; to settle more deeply into my life and into being me, and into finding the ways to most deeply be myself, rather than waiting for some sort of moment of transformation or awakening. 

Project Wayfinder

Project Wayfinder is a curriculum designed to equip high school and college students with the skills to find belonging and purpose, and to create meaning. This educational program is a collaboration with Stanford University and is taught to thousands of students worldwide.

As Wayfinder’s Head of Design, how did your time spent with people near the end of their lives inform your perspective for this project?  

I first came to Wayfinder because my neighbour and dear friend had won a fellowship at Stanford to start this project. When he approached me I was just finishing Thoughts in Passing and he said listen, you’ve just spent the last few years working on meaning-making at the end of life, asking people who were dying what they regretted and what gave their lives purpose, let’s build an organization that goes back to the beginning and gives students the tools to navigate their lives in a meaningful way and to live without regret. And that’s been such a driving force for me and really links Thoughts in Passing and Wayfinder so seamlessly. We were also really inspired by Victor Frankl and Emily Esfahani Smith, and what they saw as the pillars of meaning-making. These include love, work, transcendence, purpose, story-telling, and suffering  - that we can find meaning out of our suffering and the challenges that we have in our lives. We built our curriculum around their pillars and the themes from Thoughts in Passing. So a lot of the work we do at Wayfinder is about belonging and purpose, and then throughout we thread these ideas of story-telling and self-transcendence into everything we do.

You’ve already spoken a bit about meaning in life, could you talk about belonging and purpose and their importance as well?

So the way that I think about meaning, and this is probably how someone like Frankl would have talked about it, is that meaning in life is a broader umbrella category, and then within that there are different ways that we can approach and find meaning in our lives. Different people have different areas where they find more meaning. For me, self-transcendence is one that is very core for my own stance of meaningfulness, in the sense of being deeply connected to the natural world or through my art-making and things like that. But you could just as easily derive meaning from other areas like purpose, finding direction through your acts or your labour and service. Or you could find meaning through belonging, in the sense of feeling that you belong with yourself, with other people, and within the places that you inhabit. So I think there are lots of different ways to find meaning in life but they are all important. To live a truly meaningful life I think all of these areas need to be cultivated, you might just find that you have a particular leaning toward one or two.

And I don’t think these are things that come easily. We used to have religious institutions that offered their own frames of meaning, but living in a much more secular world we have to begin proactively cultivating meaning and connection in our lives in other ways. I don’t think there’s a natural home for that now, so that’s what we’re trying to do through the Wayfinder curriculum.

I love that one of Wayfinder’s core values is “engaging with our aliveness.” What do you think are some of the most effective ways to cultivate joy, play, and flow?

We think about this all the time! Wayfinder has a whole section in the curriculum that’s just about play and joy, and we really try to centre on this. And quite frankly we centre on it because it’s not at the centre of the school system. There’s often no space for joy and play, but I think there has to be! Any life that has meaning to it needs to centre on joy and play.

I think what joy, play, and flow all have in common is you’re not spending time in the future or the past. They all share with each other the quality of the present moment and being in the present moment. They invite us to step outside of our cognitive minds - the planning for the future or lamenting about the past - and they squeeze us into the present moment where we’re able to let go of ourselves a little bit.

Ultimately everyone has to find for themselves what that means for them, and Wayfinder has an activity called “Grounding in Joy” that helps students explore this. We ask them what do you love to do? What activities make you feel engaged and energized, where you lose track of time when doing them? They don’t have to be things you do all the time - maybe you only ever did it once - but things or moments that were joyful and made you feel alive. Then we ask them to connect these “loves” to different verbs we call “roots.” These include being in the moment, being challenged, competing, reflecting, adventuring, relaxing, playing, learning, leading, caring, designing, organizing, collaborating, connecting, listening, problem solving, and moving your body. Finally, we ask them to pick the four verbs with the most connections and invite them to identify daily ways they can engage these “roots.” For me, exploring is so central to finding joy. So I’m always asking myself how can I bring more exploration into my life? 

(A cross-over note that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler, who worked with hundreds of people nearing end of life, said the most common deathbed regret is that people didn’t make enough time for play)

The Forgotten Teachers and other projects!

Can you tell me about The Forgotten Teachers project that you’re working on and where it will be featured?

Forgotten Teachers is a project I’ve been working on with my dear friend Brian Isett who is a neuroscientist and poet, just a wonderful thinker. Forgotten Teachers is a story about how consciousness and life evolved on planet earth, told through the lens of several “teachers” (e.g., Sun, Plants, Trees). The story is told as sort of a whimsical, dreamlike fairytale, about how these teachers informed the bodies and the minds that we have today, but all based in true evolutionary biology. We’re taking a lot of very complex ideas and trying to really simplify them linguistically and visually, so we use a lot of visual metaphors and poetry. We very much wanted to make something that got people to re-imagine their relationship with the universe and the aliveness of the world around them. At this point it’s probably going to be a children’s book, which we weren’t expecting! This project has taken on many different evolutions, but that seems to be where we’re settling and I think it’s great. I feel like some of my favourite books are books that were intended for children, but are just so magical, full of wonder, and written so beautifully.

Do you have any new projects in the works, or ideas for future initiatives/installations?

My projects right now are launching The Forgotten Teachers, growing Wayfinder, and birthing two children, haha! I’m trying not to take on any other projects. I tend to get very deep and obsessive about my projects. I kind of need one thing at a time, but whatever that thing is becomes the entirety of my mind. It’s what I think about when I sleep, when I’m walking, when I’m doing yoga, it just becomes everything, sometimes to a flaw. The longer I work on a project and the more I become tethered, the deeper I go, the more and more excited I get about all the things that I could add to make it better. And then it grows and grows and grows and becomes more elaborate and detailed, and then before you know it you’re in it for years!

How has your relationship with life and death changed? Are there specific ways you bring awareness of impermanence and transience into your life now? 

I think about death much less than I used to. When I say used to I don’t mean while I was doing Thoughts in Passing, even before Thoughts in Passing it was something I thought about a lot. Like what am I supposed to do with my life? What does it all mean? And I don’t feel like that anymore, I feel much more in the flow of my life. I feel very sure of my values and what matters to me and the people I love and all of that. So I feel more deeply embedded in what is and the life that I have.

As to specific ways that I bring awareness of impermanence and transience into my life, I meditate every morning, and meditation is all about transience - transience of sensations, thoughts, etc., so it’s very central. And then the other way is about a year ago I moved out of the city and further into northern California, so I’m much more connected to nature. I think to live more embedded in the natural world is to practice impermanence on a daily basis. I feel much more connected to change. When we are in the natural world there is no shying away from impermanence and transience and death, it’s just so part of what the natural world is. Our human world and modern culture have done a very good job of trying to protect people within society against these ideas of impermanence and death, and I do think that at the heart of our consumptive culture is a sort of death denial, so there’s something beautiful about being home in the natural world that doesn’t deny the reality of being alive.

For more information on Claudia Bicen and her projects, visit:

https://claudiabicen.art/

http://www.thoughtsinpassing.com/

https://www.projectwayfinder.com/team/claudia-bicen