“Sunshine In My Soul” by Jason Kotecki. 12 x 12. Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!
I do not know how people survive without faith in this dark world.
Perhaps it’s why our rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide are at all-time highs. My faith is like having sunshine in my soul. No matter how heavy the storm or dark the night, there is a joy that never dissipates, giving me hope.
I did not always have this faith. Like many, my perception of God came from the reflection of Him I saw in others. Often, it was a pretty distorted version.
But there were people I encountered who were in alignment with the merciful, mighty, and loving Father I have come to know and love.
This is the God whose light I pray shines forth from my work, so that others may see, believe, and experience this sunshine in their soul.
“To Sheboygan with Love” by Jason Kotecki. 16 x 16. Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!
On our very first date, Kim and I agreed to live on a lake.
As we began the process of getting to know each other, we got talking about our ideal place to live. For some reason, Idaho was mentioned. (When you grow up in a small town in Illinois surrounded by cornfields, almost everywhere feels more exotic.) We talked of mountains and potatoes (obviously), but pine trees and lakes took precedence.
We both agreed that living on a lake surrounded by tall pine trees would be an ideal place to settle down. (We didn’t necessarily know it would be together.)
The two of us dated for five years before getting married, and that vision of lake living stayed with us. We never lived on any of the four lakes that make up the heart and soul of Madison, Wisconsin, in the twenty years we called it home. We did spend hours and hours walking along those lakes, dreaming and scheming together, trying our best to figure out how to make it happen.
We were also open to other lakes in other locations. We just knew it needed to be bigger than a pond, something large enough to accommodate a pontoon boat. We tried on lots of places, including Idaho, where we finally visited for the first time while celebrating our twentieth wedding anniversary. After all those years, we couldn’t shake the dream of living on a lake.
We never anticipated it would be a Great one.
Sheboygan didn’t hit our radar until one day during the height of the pandemic. A friend of ours knew our dream. He took note of the fact that we often took vacations near the ocean because we loved the sound of the waves, and suggested we check out Lake Michigan (which looks a lot like an ocean when you’re standing on the shore, unable to see the other side).
The idea had never occurred to us. We pulled up a map and surveyed the cities east coast of Wisconsin. What about Sheboygan? I had spoken there once, and remember enjoying a few moments I had to spend sitting by the lake. We googled it, and learned it was known as the Bratwurst Capitol of the World and the Malibu of the Midwest because of its unique geographical qualities that provide ideal surfing conditions.
That kicked off a magical and miraculous journey, a long story made short by saying we now live in Sheboygan. On a lake.
This painting celebrates Sheboygan, the funny-sounding city on the shores of Lake Michigan, known for brats and surfing. But it also represents our prayers.
Saying a prayer is like launching a message in a bottle into the ocean. Once a prayer leaves your heart, you lose all control. You hope it reaches God, but once it floats out of sight, it’s easy for doubt to creep in: Did it get lost? Swallowed by a shark? Did it reach its destination only to be rejected or forgotten? You might be tempted to wonder how you could have been so foolish to trust in such an uncontrollable, unpredictable, mysterious method. Did you think this would actually work?
Our prayer to live on a lake was a message in a bottle. It floated out there for two decades.
The dream felt more and more foolish as the years wore on and our business took longer to grow than we’d expected. There were times I thought the dream was lost at sea. There were moments I wished it really was, because I was so weary from wondering what happened to it. I figured it would be easier, and less painful, to have never dreamed the dream or prayed the prayer at all.
Maybe you have a prayer like that, a message in a bottle that you’re certain is lost. I can’t tell you how your prayer will be answered, but I know for sure it’s not lost. It’s definitely not forgotten.
Somehow, our prayers find our way back, with answers washing up on unexpected shores at unexpected times. But it’s always at exactly the right time and delivers exactly what we need, even if it looks different than we imagined.
God will not let you miss your future.
It takes faith to release a prayer into the great unknown, and that faith is always rewarded.
“Bear Attack” by Jason Kotecki. 20 x 20. Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!
Make love, not war.
Those hippies were on to something.
No one likes war.
Although “free love” turns out to not have been the best option, we do have to replace it with something.
If I tell you to stop thinking about a pink elephant on roller skates, what are you thinking about? No matter what you do, DO NOT think about a pink elephant on roller skates. Just stop.
But what if I told you to imagine a blue horse with spots of silver glitter galloping on top of a rainbow?
It’s not enough to eliminate war, we need to replace it with something else. It’s not enough to eliminate a bad habit, we need to replace it with a good one. It’s not enough to eliminate negative thoughts, we need to replace them with positive ones.
Our family enjoys watching Masterchef, the cooking competition reality show hosted by chef Gordon Ramsay. One of the home cooks who qualified was a former heroin addict named Ryan who admitted to spending ten years slowly killing himself. His dad stayed by his side, never giving up hope. Finally, a breakthrough came, and Ryan became obsessed with cooking, learning and perfecting various techniques. He shared how crucial it was to give his addictive personality something else to focus on.
You can try to stop being afraid. Or you can start being grateful. Because it’s impossible to feel fear when you are being grateful.
So what if instead of dropping fear into your mind, you dropped gratitude instead?
Instead of dropping political rants on social media, what if you dropped encouraging words or funny photos onto your timeline instead?
Instead of dropping judgement on one another, what if we dropped compliments instead?
This painting is a reminder that if we truly want to get rid of something bad, we need to replace it with something good.
“Ring of Fire” by Jason Kotecki. 20 x 20. Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!
Everyone thinks the excitement that accompanies the start of a relationship is the best.
Granted, it IS intoxicating. Everything is new and mysterious. You’re wondering if the other person just likes you or actually “likes you” likes you. A simple touch ignites an inferno of passion. There’s so much to talk about as you’re constantly learning new things about one another. That way he chews, and that way she steals your jacket when she’s cold, is still cute and endearing.
There’s no doubt about it: The beginning of a new relationship is pretty great.
But then again, in the beginning, you’re just two separate entities. Like bread and cheese. Cheese is good. Bread is good. Put them together and you have a cheese sandwich. Also good.
But Johnny Cash was right when he sang that love is a burning thing. It doesn’t get really good until you’ve gone through some fires together. That’s when you really get to know what you’re made of, as you melt together and you become one. That melty, gooey goodness is where the magic’s at. And have you ever tried to separate a grilled cheese sandwich? It’s not easy. Which is how it should be.
Combined, my parents and Kim’s parents have been married for over 90 years. They have struggled and endured many, many fires. But through it all, they’ve stuck together. In today’s day and age, that’s no small feat. Is there a secret? I don’t know. I’m sure there’s luck involved, but I know that it’s not all luck. I know communication is really important. And mutual respect. And a willingness to give more than you get.
But I think the real secret is that it comes down to a choice to stick together, no matter what. Infatuation is a feeling, but love? Love is a choice. When my parents exchanged vows on their wedding day, promising they’d be there for each other no matter what, in sickness and in health, through the good times and the fires…they meant it. For reals.
And when I married Kim, that’s how I looked at it too. Death will have to break us apart; it’s the only option. We have not left an escape hatch for ourselves. The ships back to a world where we go our separate ways are smoldering sticks of charcoal. When disagreements emerge, a fight erupts, and feelings are hurt, Plan A is to work it out.
There is no Plan B.
When you don’t burn the ships, there’s a very high probability that someday, you’ll use them to sail away from one another.
Of course, you can throw all of this out the window if both people aren’t on board. If one flakes out or doesn’t live up to the promise, it all falls apart. And that is nothing short of heartbreaking.
I write this to give hope to the newlyweds, to the people thinking about giving this love thing another go, and to those who are in the middle of one of those scary fires right now.
As James Blunt sang, “Everybody wants a flame, they don’t want to get burnt.”
It’s true: once you get past the lovey-dovey stage of a relationship, and experience the fires that flare up when things get real, you will come out a little charred.
But that char – the battle scars from a life lived together – add a richness, depth, and magic that a regular old cheese sandwich can only dream about.
“Hope in the Desert” by Jason Kotecki. 16 x 20. Oil on canvas. Original is available. 🟢 Shop this art!
When Kim and I started this adventure, we were optimistic. Very. When we decided to abandon my career as a freelance illustrator and designer, we felt very strongly that my comic strip, Kim & Jason was going to hit the big time. We planned to live on Kim’s kindergarten teaching salary, which we knew would require sacrifice, but we were fairly certain that within a year, Kim & Jason would take the world by storm and we’d be exchanging phone calls with Oprah and her people.
We had no idea it would take five years before we’d be able to earn a living with our business. And by earning a living, I mean simply replacing Kim’s robust $23,000 teaching salary.
It didn’t take long for the optimism that launched our big dream to fade. For much of those five years, it felt like we were living in the desert. Any encouraging email from a reader, or an order on our store that didn’t come from someone we knew, were like drops of water on a parched tongue.
The dream never died, but we wondered at times if it was merely a mirage. Every so often, we’d lie awake in bed, wondering if we were officially crazy. We certainly felt like the whole process of scraping to pay bills while struggling to turn a profit was driving us mad.
The truth is, I had a lot of dreams that never came true.
We lived in an apartment for eight years, which is exactly seven years longer than we planned. We went to an open house in a trendy, developing neighborhood for a condo we wanted, just to get photos for our vision board (which I thought was a pretty clever way to speed the process along.)
Long story short, we never got into that condo. Kim & Jason never hit the big time. It never even hit the medium time.
But I stand before you today to let you know that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was right: God’s gifts do put man’s best dreams to shame.
During those early days, speaking was not on the radar. Giving a TED talk wasn’t on my vision board (mostly because TED didn’t even exist yet). But shortly AFTER Kim retired, speaking emerged as a big driver of our business model and enabled our family to visit some amazing places I never could have imagined.
We never got the condo, but that was because we were led to a house instead, which we bought just as the condo market in Madison was cratering due to oversupply. And a hotel with a big parking lot got built right next to the condo we had pined for.
Bullet. Dodged.
I meanwhile, I retired Kim & Jason in 2007. But I still make art, I think it’s even better, and it’s definitely more fulfilling. And it led to an evening like this.
Like an explorer marooned in a desert, life can be a struggle. Things can seem bleak, desolate, hopeless.
Maybe this feels a lot like you, right now.
During these times, a simple glass of water seems like a priceless treasure.
But keep going. Have faith. Stay the course.
What you ultimately encounter may end up putting your original dreams to shame.
“C Plane” by Jason Kotecki. 20 x 20. Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!
Remember alphabet soup?
I ask you to remember because the last time you had it probably wasn’t yesterday or last week. It may have been a decade or four.
Something about alphabet soup brings out a sense of wonder and curiosity in us as kids. We stir it around to see if any secret messages emerge randomly, like a vegetable-fueled Ouiji board. We use our spoon to carefully arrange our own words, spell our name, a simple sentence, or maybe a dirty word…Just me?
But then we outgrow alphabet soup. Why?
Are we afraid our sophistication will be challenged? That we’ll be considered immature? That people won’t take us seriously?
In a seemingly unrelated note, it’s impossible for me to see an airplane and not think of my father-in-law, Gary. He loves airplanes. He used to drag his wife and four daughters to air shows. Their reviews of the regular excursions are mixed, but one thing was constant: it was always an opportunity for Gary’s inner child to soar.
I had the pleasure of attending the Oshkosh Airshow with him a few years ago. According to him, it’s the Super Bowl of air shows. He may have technically been sixty at the time, but it seemed more like he was six. His passion for airplanes has never faded.
Recently, he took my kids to watch sky divers jump out of planes and land safely a few feet from them on the ground. You might think he wanted to share a passion with his grandkids. You’d be partly right, but let’s be honest, it didn’t really matter if there was anyone else around. It was merely an excuse to indulge in a little bit of wonder.
When we are kids, we are drawn to wonder, and there are so many things that light us up and get us excited.
Too often, like our declining consumption of alphabet soup, we neglect or hide the things that light us up.
Maybe it’s because we are afraid our sophistication will be challenged. Or that we’ll be considered immature. Or that people won’t take us seriously.
There is a phrase we often use: guilty pleasures. They are things we enjoy but feel guilty for doing so. Usually, there is no real reason we should feel guilty; it’s just that they threaten our carefully curated likes and dislikes that fit in with the people we associate with or want respect from.
I’m with Dave Grohl, lead singer of the Foo Fighters, who said, “F*¢K guilty pleasures.” Like what you like. If you like Britney Spears, like Britney Spears.
Embrace your guilty pleasures. Find what lights you up and love it. Reconnect with the passions that get your inner child fired up and own them.
“93% Weird” by Jason Kotecki. 24 x 40. Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!
Many fruits have a similar vibe. You get some variations in color and texture, but “round” is pretty much the regular shape.
Even the tomato, which I grew up being taught was a vegetable, wants to get in with the fruit group. And upon a quick glance, we say, “Sure, whatever, you seem to fit the description.”
And then there’s the pineapple.
Compared to most fruits, pineapples are weird. Unfortunately, weird isn’t usually a compliment.
Before I take the stage for a speech, at the very end of my introduction, there is a passage that talks about me “spending time with my beautiful wife and three weird kids.”
It’s always fun – and telling – to see how the introducer handles this bit. Sometimes they read it as is, but other times they are quick to uncomfortably interject, “I didn’t write that!” I’ve even had some who eliminate it altogether.
Ultimately I exclaim to them that, in our household, being called “weird” is a badge of honor. For example, one day, my wife was telling my oldest daughter that it’s OK to be weird. It makes life more interesting, she said, and like Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, the things that make us weird are often our greatest superpowers. She informed Lucy that being weird makes life better.
The next day, we heard Lucy asking her little brother, “Ben, are you weird?”
“No,” he replied, innocently.
“Then you’re going to have a horrible life.”
Now don’t get me wrong. It is possible to be too weird. “Licking-the-salt-from-almonds-and-putting-them-back-in-the-bowl” kind of weird. Or “owning-thirty-seven-cats-and-dressing-them-all-to-look-like-Taylor-Swift” weird.
So the rule of thumb in our family is that you should shoot for 93% weird; anything after that is just too much.
The cold hard truth is that most of us aren’t anywhere near that level of weird.
When we were kids, at the very beginning, we were all weird. We made up weird games, had weird bedtime routines, enjoyed weird hobbies, and dressed up in weird clothes in weird combinations. But eventually, someone sees us living our bliss, decides it’s weird and shames us. We get made fun of in the schoolyard, on the bus, or across the dinner table. For the first time, it occurs to us that some of the things we do might be looked upon with contempt by another person.
From then on, we start paying attention. We start noticing what’s “in” and what’s not. We take heed of the things that could get us ridiculed, singled out, and shamed. And we stop doing them. We smooth out the rough edges and start hiding our weirdness. And one by one, little parts of us die.
Possibly the greatest tragedy of our lives is that we spend so much time conforming to the world around us, just to avoid that feeling of shame ever again.
And the world is worse off for it.
“Ridicule is the terrible witherer of the flower of the imagination. It binds us where we should be free.”–Madeleine L’Engle
People only have the power to shame us if we give it to them. When we surrender our weird, we are imprisoning ourselves and handing over the key. It’s too expensive to pay attention to what everyone else thinks.
“How Many Licks?” by Jason Kotecki. 30 x 24. Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!
How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?
A commercial that appeared on TV when I was a child asked that very question. It turns out that a number of folks have tried to get to the bottom of this.
A group of engineering students from Purdue University built a licking machine, modeled after a human tongue, and determined that it took an average of 364 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.
A chemical engineering student from the University of Michigan built his own licking machine and recorded that it required 411 licks.
And a group of junior high school students ditched machines in favor of human lickers, and reported an average of 144 licks.
Apparently, the world really may never know how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.
I remember the first time I took my kids to Wrigley Field. It was the year after the Cubs won the World Series, and the kids were excited to see their favorite players in person. It was a beautiful day, the Cubbies won, and we relished singing “Go, Cubs, Go” with 40,000 fellow Cub fans.
We looked forward to that game for months. As we do for many of the firsts in our lives. Your first baseball game. Your first kiss. The first time you get to drive by yourself. The first place of your own. Your first child.
We anticipate the first times and do our best to savor them.
But the last times are different. They have a habit of sneaking up on us. Undoubtedly, there was a last time that I held my youngest daughter in the middle of the night, in a grouchy sleep-deprived state, comforting her – begging her — back to sleep. But I don’t remember it, because I didn’t realize it was the last time when it happened.
The first times come with a lot of fanfare. But the last times come and go without a whisper.
How many dinners do you have left with your parents?
How many anniversaries do you have left with your spouse?
How many bedtime stories do you have left to read to your kids?
How many fishing trips do you have left with your grandchildren?
How many licks?
There is no machine we can build that will tell us. Not exactly.
We can guess, we can estimate, we can hope for the best.
But I bet that number is a lot smaller than we think it is.
“Good Fortune” by Jason Kotecki. 12 x 12. Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!
Lucky is winning a game of Candyland against my daughter.
Most things in life that seem lucky are often anything but.
I don’t like how chalking up someone’s success to a lucky break strips away credit. Not only from the person who worked hard, but also from God, who (often anonymously) orchestrated so many of the events and circumstances along the way.
Undoubtedly, where you are born, who your parents are, the color of your skin, and whether or not you grow up to be 6-foot-8 with the ability to jump over a school bus are completely out of your control and could all be considered “luck.” And yet, having any of these so-called advantages is no guarantee for success, while not having them does not condemn one to certain failure. Every NBA draft class is filled with dudes who won the genetic lottery but won’t last long in the league.
I could be all bent out of shape because my gifts are not advantageous to playing professional basketball. But we are all given different gifts that become our advantages. True joy and fulfillment are the result of fashioning a life that utilizes those gifts to the best of our ability in the service of others.
The Roman philosopher Seneca said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Luck is out of your control. But you know what isn’t? Finding the courage, discipline, and persistence to try something that might not work. See also: Putting in the hours, perfecting your craft, and getting back up after you fail. Sometimes the hardest work is keeping your faith when everyone else paints you a fool.
You have the good fortune to be alive, right now, with an abundance of realized and untapped gifts and talents. What you do with them next has nothing to do with luck.
Want some good fortune? Be good at what you do, and be a good person.
Spend your life working on that, and the luck part has a way of taking care of itself.
“In This Kitchen We Dance” by Jason Kotecki. 20 x 20. Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!
I painted this for my wife’s 40th birthday. It’s one of her favorite quotes, and it perfectly captures the spirit that fills our kitchen.
As kids, we danced all the time. We danced when we were excited. We danced when we were happy. We even danced when we were bored. Why did we ever stop?
Maybe we started worrying about looking foolish.
Maybe we’ve discovered that the world isn’t as carefree as we thought it was.
Maybe we are afraid of pulling something.
The kitchen often serves as the primary gathering place in a home. From time to time, our kitchen hosts spontaneous dance parties. If a favorite song comes on, we crank the volume, and our family of five casts our cares to the wind and shakes our booties to the music. Mind you, these dance parties are mostly devoid of any talent (although my son Ben has some sweet moves), but they are always bursting with joy and enthusiasm.
You see, kitchen dancing doesn’t require sweet moves.
It does require you to move, however. Even a little booty shake can make your body feel better.
It also requires the willingness to be vulnerable by looking a little silly, which is one of the most intimate ways to bond with another person.
And it requires the ability to take oneself lightly, which helps lighten the heavy loads that weigh us down.
