| Experience (Draft Four) Walking down a crowded sidewalk with distinct purpose—perhaps you need to fetch a bolt from the local hardware store or intend to grab a cup of coffee from Starbucks—the world is likely shut out to you by your focus on that next task. Then a flashing light or a loud noise breaks your concentration, you are pulled out of that deadness with the force of an unseen hand that has grabbed you, your eyes meeting the eyes of another poor soul on some similar mundane task. The two of you are, for just a split second, one person. You know her purpose, and she yours. You are having a human moment, a moment of Experience. Just as suddenly, the door to unity shuts closed and the two of you again become detached, closed to any further understanding, and life goes on in much the same fashion as before, a series of errands met at the end of the day by exhaustion. These experiences hold us, shake us, unnerve us, and tells us that we are alive. They make us fall in love, and out of love. They give us our vision 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 it tells us stories of our lives much like holy texts. Experience, then, forms our memory: your mother teaching you how to bake a cake, your father how to change the oil in your car; your teammates mobing you after a game-winning hit, your teammates avoiding you after a game-losing error; experiencing your first kiss, and your real first kiss. And if experience orders our past, it also creates our future. How open we are to Experience tells us who we are and defines out lives. It might start when sitting in a café, with a book, alone, reading the words in front of you, 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 how the bills just keep coming at home. Then a sentence jumps out at you, fully embracing you, creating an image of a place far from your seat by the window overlooking the sidewalk and the bustle of others 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, wondering what it takes to feel alive like that all of the time. Finding time to experience life should not be so hard. Although adulthood has deadened the wonder that we experience from time to time and replaced it with a seriousness and self importance that is attached to getting ahead, leaving a residue of unhappiness, some thing keeps reminding us at unusual times that life is meant to be experienced, to be viewed with the eyes and wonder that you had as a child. But our success in life’s pursuits conspire against us. 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 being alive. No, not Madison Avenue’s defintion of beauty—those attractions are simply more material desires—but real beauty. Having a sense of aesthetics is just as human as all of the other drives in our lives, and perhaps has been sacrificed by our responsibilities in life. A sense of aesthetics allows us to see the beauty in a crack in a sidewalk or in crooked-toothed smile of a friend who is genuinely happy. Although beauty is a gift of the real world, art tries to capture that beauty and it helps train our sense of aesthetics. Using the artist’s eye 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, 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 the life of 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. 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 in 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. What was important as a matter of task in one moment is meaningless in that moment of Experience. In art we find it, in music, in paintings, in literature because art captures it. 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 difficulty can be as beautiful as the flower. Peter Crooke January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 |