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Going to Pasalacqua
I'm Margarida,
from Portugal, 16.
mskrisneel
The need to want
The other day I posted this picture of a hastily drawn, but heavily felt piece of artwork. It was created with my cheap drawing pad, and even cheaper junior artist cray-pas, which were both purchased several semesters ago for a graduate course in Expressive Arts Therapy. I have never considered myself to be a proficient visual artist. To be honest, I’m pretty terrible. I can color within the lines, and I’m getting to be very good at the swirls that I doodle in the corners of most of my notebooks. This drawing, while simple and abstract, offered an extremely accurate visual representation of my current state. You see, earlier in the evening, I had texted my kind and patient Conor a list of things that I wanted to do but felt that I couldn’t:
“I want to paint, I want to live on the beach, I want to learn how to French braid my hair, I want to play the harp, the cello, and maybe the accordion, I want to dance every day and I want to stop saying ‘I want’ and start doing.”
His response was simple and sincere: “Well you can do all of that!”
These little outbursts are not uncommon. I have always had an overwhelming lust to venture out and experience things. I did have a more impulsive and whimsical (read: irresponsible) side when I was a bit younger and not yet fully aware of adult responsibilities, but at some point in my college career I had instilled in myself the idea that if I wasn’t doing something productive then I was wasting my time. I would give up things that made me happy in favor of working an extra weekend job or two, or adding a minor, or contemplate switching career paths because music wasn’t a ‘practical’ pursuit. Interestingly enough, Conor recently posted a similar sentiment which further encouraged me to simmer on this idea.
Since I am still a student in many ways, I turn to research and other people’s words to help me to understand my own musings. This morning, by chance, I stumbled upon Daniel Gilbert’s TED Talk The Psychology of Your Future Self, within which I discovered this beautiful group of statements:
“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’re ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.”
In this talk, Daniel describes the phenomenon of how our preferences and the values that we place on them will inevitably change over time. What is important to me in this moment will be different at the same time tomorrow, and two years from now. In the spirit of that, I returned to the drawing board, literally. Conor’s simple answer was absolutely correct. The things that I want to do are not outlandish or immature, in fact most of them include simple daily pleasures that need only a little bit of preparation to be tackled. If I hesitate to indulge in things that make my heart soar, they may not hold the same value for me in the future.
I wanted to paint, but had no paint…so instead I took the first step and took out the drawing pad. It was the swirl of thoughts within my heart and soul primitively scratched on paper, but to me it was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in days. This is a start. I have lived for a mere quarter of a century and still have so many more years to fill with happiness and self-love. If I can say only one thing with confidence, it is that I am, and always will be, a work in progress.