I need to make a confession that is slightly awkward for a man who has spent his career in the science of human flourishing: for most of that career, the arts were scenery to me.
Not disliked — nothing as decisive as that. Just… assumed to belong to other people. People who knew which Beethoven symphony was which. People who could stand in front of a painting for longer than it takes to read the little card next to it. I had my work, my running, my faith, my family; the concert hall and the gallery were rooms in other people’s houses.
Then the research started refusing to leave me alone. In the wellbeing literature I work with every day, the arts kept turning up — not as decoration but as delivery mechanisms for nearly everything we know helps people: attention, awe, meaning, connection, expression. A World Health Organization review of over nine hundred studies. Cohort data following tens of thousands of people. A young field — the Positive Humanities — assembling itself around a simple, old idea: that humanity has always kept its deepest medicine in its songs and stories, and that we can now study how the medicine works.
The professor of flourishing was skipping one of flourishing’s best-evidenced doors.
The awkward part was personal. I could cite the evidence — and I could not tell you the last time I had let a piece of music have my full attention for ten minutes.
So I did what I always do with a gap between what I know and how I live: I built something. Not for the connoisseurs — they are well served already, and they were never the point. For people like me. Beginners. People who suspect a symphony might do something to them but don’t know where the door handle is. People who feel, in galleries, that everyone else got a programme they didn’t.
That is what ImagineArts is: the house I wished existed when I finally admitted I wanted in. Small guided practices, minutes long, built on the actual studies. A community whose first house rule is that asking what a sonnet is matters as much as knowing all of Shakespeare’s. A daily book of voices — verified, because I am an academic and I cannot help myself — each one paired with something small to do.
I am still a beginner. I say that with some pride now. In the months of building this, I have sat with one Vermeer for fifteen minutes and been startled by what showed up in minute twelve. I have learned what a counter-melody is by finally hearing one. I have read Marcus Aurelius the way he intended — a few lines, kept for the day — instead of the way academics read, which is all of it, once, for a footnote.
The arts I almost missed turned out not to mind the lateness. That is one of their kindest properties: every door opens from wherever you are standing. If you have been assuming, as I did, that these rooms belong to other people — I built this place to tell you they don’t.