Art can provide you with a way of visualizing new directions for your life, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Would you like to explore new directions your life might take? Susan Magsamen, director of the Arts+Mind lab at Johns Hopkins and coauthor of a new book called Your Mind on Art, says the arts, and especially making or doing art, can help.

Magsamen: As a maker you can risk all kinds of things. You can risk materials that you have, the way that you’re expressing it, who you want to share it with. When you’re also making you have the ability to be able to have agency. Nobody can tell you what you think. Nobody can tell you what you need to do. Nobody can say you can’t do it because it’s your art. And I think you can choose whether you put it into the world or not. So making implicitly gives you tremendous independence and helps to form identity. In a way that really is quite unique.  :32

Magsamen says research shows that those who develop agency in making art experience spillover of this life skill into other areas of their life, helping them to live more intentionally. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.