| Experience (Draft Five) Remember the last time you walked along a crowded sidewalk with distinct purpose—perhaps you needed to fetch a bolt from the local hardware store or intended to grab a cup of coffee from Starbucks? Then a flashing light or a loud noise broke your concentration, and you were pulled out of a deadness with the force of an unseen hand that grabbed you, perhaps by the neck, your eyes met the eyes of another poor soul on a similar task. The two of you were, for just a split second, brother, sister, united by your desires to be alive. You noticed the color of her hair and the way she skipped to the top of the curb, and she noticed the shape of your hands and the time-saving pace of your walk. Just as suddenly, these images lost their color and shape and the two of you again became detached, closed to further vision, and life continued in much the same fashion as before, a series of tasks met at the end of the day by nothing more than exhaustion. These experiences hold us, shake us, unnerve us. They create colorful visions of ourselves and of others and of the world. Sometimes I think that experience should be spelled with a capital “E” as we use a capital letter to spell God because this is an experience of spirit. This Experience fills our memory with beautiful images and sets the stage for more: You laugh with your mother when your remember her teaching you how to bake a cake and to cover yourself in flour; you sigh with your father as you remember his teaching you how to change the oil in your car as you insist that they just don’t make them like that anymore; you remember, alone, the time your teammates mobbed the playing field in screams of joy after you made that game-winning hit, or your teammates sitting silently and leaving you on the stark green grass of the place of your game-losing error; you relive the moment when you placed your lips slowly against the soft lips of another—your first kiss—and your body trembles in partnership with another again and again when you remember the love of your real first kiss. It might start when sitting in a café, with a book, alone, reading the black words on the ivory page, but only remembering every fifth word or so and spending the energy needed for the other four worrying about that report that needs finishing at work or that the bills just keep coming at home. Then a sentence jumps out at you, fully embracing you, creating colorful images and shapes of a place far from your seat by the window overlooking the sidewalk and the gray bustle outside. You are shaking hands with a character, feeling his pain, his joy, his anger. You are opening to Experience. You are alive and breathing and lost, tucked away from the cares of your daily habits; then you remember that the phone bill is due and you have returned to numbness. But the residue of that colorful world makes you wonder what it takes to feel alive like that all of the time. Finding time to experience life should not be so hard. Although some thing keeps reminding us at unusual times that beauty is meant to be experienced, to be viewed through the eyes and wonder that you had as a child, adulthood has deadened that wonder and replaced it with a seriousness and self importance that is attached to getting ahead. Any unhappiness, we are led to believe, is caused by our failures on this pursuit to success. Though this material-world argument looks pretty logical, this is a false god that will lead only to a mind-numbing life, even if a financially successful one. These mantras of modern day man fail to take into account being in love, seeing a fresh young flower, feeling a sense of beauty and esthetics when walking along a deserted beach at night, the lights from distant ships bobbing on the horizon. If these true emotions do not fit into a five-year-plan of success, they have no place in our lives, the argument concludes. But these brief moments of Experience remind us that life can be full of wonder. The question is this: how do we experience life more fully? Beauty. A single word answer is the key to Experience if we allow it equal billing in our complex, busy lives. No, not Madison Avenue’s defintion of beauty—those attractions are simply more material desires—but real beauty, real aesthetics. Having a sense of aesthetics is just as human as all of the other drives in our lives. It allows us to see the beauty in a crack in a sidewalk or in crooked-toothed smile of a friend who is genuinely happy. And art—since it tries to capture that beauty—is the true key to that livliness and helps train our sense of aesthetics. Using the artist’s eye, then, is the perfect model for us as we stride through our daily lives. Leaving our worries at work or at school, we need to examine our world much like the artist. The sculptor must understand her medium—whether wood or stone or metal or clay—so that she can lovingly, not create a work of art, but bring out a work of art that was always meant to be. The writer must first allow an idea to come to life, unencumbered by his destractions, before he decides what he must do to make the poem, story, or essay what it needs to be. Artists have always viewed what we consider to be inanimate objects or abstract ideas as having a soul, as being alive. And in that mystery lies beauty and esthetics, the foundation of Experience. We would be better off personally, if not socially and politically, if we tried to live part of our lives like the artist. As difficult as that is, the work is worth the price. We have always known intellectually that there is no need to worry about that report when it’s three o’clock in the morning and there is nothing we can do about it. But we worry anyway, and we turn to fixes that are only temporary or they only deal with symptoms of our dissatisfaction, further blocking out beauty. Yet we have the ability in ourselves to have true human Experience. We just need to be aware of it, that’s all. We will recognize it when we see it and mix it in with all of our responsibilities in healthy doses. Embracing Experience is that thing that makes us tingle inside, makes us want to giggle like a child. But the Experience will not happen on a regular basis unless we let it. At forty-five years old, I see youth and age with equal clarity. We are conditioned from early on: I see young people trying to live but being told, “No, just do as you’re told; don’t have an opinion that is contrary to the already-accepted opinion of those around you; if you are to be successful, you must be serious.” I see elderly people who bought that attitude long ago. Both young and old are very unhappy. Life is difficult. Even if it couldn’t be any other way, look at it in just the right way and even our difficulties can be as beautiful as the flower. Peter Crooke January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 |