13th
Appreciating Art
As we grow older, we trust less other people to fill the gaps in our soul. We become more complacent with goodbyes, the rotating carousel of people in our lives. When I was young and had so much faith in people, it felt so devastating to lose someone — sometimes, someone I never had. You pin your hopes and dreams on stolen glances and dark thoughts. Every love was so full of possibilities. Growing older is largely the collective process of becoming more realistic and guarded. There are plenty of fish in the sea and no one is really as they seem.
So we bide our time and decorate our souls. Some of us bury ourselves in our work, finding joy in the most arcane of places. Others sink into their own psyche, treating every goodbye as an opportunity to grow. Still others despair, seeing so much unrealized beauty in every passing glance. The best of us become a little of all of these, finding companionship where we can.
And so we grow and drift, admiring the naivety of children and seeing the brevity of all things. And who can blame us — we all desperately seek out our own place in this world, canvassing mountains and ancient, hallowed forests. Every encountered traveler is a gift and reminder of old times: of winters with family, a first shared heartbeat, long conversations into the night.
When we are twentysomething, we offer these pieces of our soul to others, searching for someone whose jigsaw matches our own. But that all fades as well and we learn to love the isolated vistas, the high plains, the frigid air. And maybe, if wisdom is in our stars, once we are weary and realize nothing in this world is new, we settle down, pitching sticks into dirt, constructing a ruin for future generations.
No one can truly live together and no one can truly part. The best we can do is surrender the best of ourselves — a serendipitous clover, shells from a distant sea, three nuggets of silver — as gifts to future explorers, the remoter the better. In hopes that when they stumble upon your individual monument to ego, they’ll clutch some semblance of your soul and in so much overbearing loneliness, weep. We all share the same starting point, but strike out in so many innumerably different patterns as to inevitably uncover more virgin land than settled cities — if we do not irrecoverably tire along the way. The sight of anything remotely human is sweet to sore eyes indeed.
So head out and explore. The further the better. Resist not the frontier with its clarion calls. The best of you is contained out there. And, I promise — the best of all of us as well.
