I see many people today afraid to use their voices, afraid to bring art into their lives. It seems many of us are taught from a young age to drastically limit the ways in which we express ourselves.
If you think of a poem, a haiku, a rhyming couplet, any phrase that sounds good in your head, write it down! If you are inspired to draw or paint, choose your canvas and get started! Where is the harm? If you are inspired to write music and create music, do it! Music has vast potential for transcending and dissolving boundaries.
If there is some issue, social or personal, a philosophical or spiritual quandary, that has been bugging you, write it down. Find a place to discuss it as openly as possible; be willing to let others critique it. Sometimes the place to discuss a matter is with friends and family, sometimes with complete strangers on Internet forums, sometimes with professors and the like, with people who have specialized knowledge in your field of inquiry.
Always keep in mind that one cannot know too much. Willful ignorance is not bliss – willing yourself not to see the base reality of the situation you are in creates a schizophrenic mind, an imagined dystopia. If you do not desire to reach the heart of the matter, its veins will plague you.
The truth is that we live in a culture where people are divided by their skin color, their assumptions about God, the amount of money in their bank accounts; the truth is that there are human beings who are systematically oppressed by other human beings; that out of ignorance of our common nature many of us have sought to avoid others, to abridge and take away the rights of others because they appear different, because they do not fit tidily in our judgment of the right ways to act.
Awakening, Enlightenment, Self-Realization: To me, these states are attainable by refusing to accept a limited view of your self. We are alive in a time when countless forces are interacting, a time of unprecedented cultural novelty. To try to limit yourself in any way – by attaching yourself to your name, your ethnicity, your locale, a religion, a static idea about God – is to burden yourself with the narrow-mindedness of others.
In truth, we are all infinitely more complex than any art-form, any combination of words, any article of clothing could ever convey. But we must have a little faith that compassion is a human quality, not the quality of a particular race, political party, or religious group; that most human beings long to end the suffering of their brothers and sisters. By creating art we can begin to open the locked vaults in our minds, and find better ways of expressing our hearts to one another. By expanding our vocabularies we can open ourselves to a broader range of emotional expression and experience.
The world today is on the razor’s edge. Our generation is given a choice: we can choose to limit ourselves, to squeeze ourselves into the social roles we have been given like hand-me-down clothing, or we can create art together, spread our wings a little and realize together that there is no bottom of the well when it comes to the potential of one individual mind.
This life may be all any of us gets. I dislike the cliché that says that we are all gems. Gems are crystalline, impenetrable: they have no room for growth; they cannot soak up and synthesize the poignancy of the world around them. I would say that human beings are like flowers, except that a flower does not have any say in the manner in which it blooms. Though we are each nourished by different soil, we all ought to have the opportunity to reach for the heavens, for the clear blue sky. Doing so in a way that you love is the only challenge worth accepting.
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“Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body I will give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all, for whenever I will—
and I will have the will, strengthened
as I’ll be with contemplation and study—
at the crucial moments I’ll recover
my spirit as was before: ascetic.”
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