There is a radical design stitched into
the very presence of every human being. From birth we are molded
into what others perceive and expect us to be, never fully grasping
any individuality in those desires.
Then, as we age, we begin to understand
the world quite beyond that in which we've been forcibly exposed to.
Whether it be through television, music, the introduction of new
people, books, or whatever other external sources that could
influence our otherwise pristine conservation of familial and close
proximity world's desires. The rebellion of such things is what
begins that massive chasm of separation between the world of old and
the world in which one creates for themselves.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily
mean that the chasm always maintains distance. Most people end up
conforming in massive ways – their rebellion of underage drinking
and casual drug usage is found out to be the same coping mechanisms
of their parents, the same ones that refused to acknowledge their own
usage of such things at the same age. The conformity of finding a
job that satisfies just enough, typically through the paychecks that
come in from said job, yet leave the rest of life unfulfilled. The
conformity of giving up on the things enjoyable in youth – the
discovery of things outside the pristine world in which one was
raised in.
Raise a glass to yourselves if you can
pretend the satisfaction of such things is enough for you. Down the
contents of said glass in an effort to dull the pain of pretending,
go to tuck your children into bed, and proceed to post more pictures
of what you made for dinner on social media in an effort to bring an
encouraging vindication to your very conformed notion of what reality
should be, all the meanwhile keeping that pristine barrier around
your own children.
There are those of us who are
philosophers, artists, believers that the value in our lives are
created solely by the things we leave behind – not the value of
ourselves, but the value of the things we do to make tomorrow a
better place. We live and die by the sadness we're forced to face,
clinging to the threads of life's fragility only because we
understand that someone has to suffer the consequences of societal
norms as a means to bring greater understanding to it tomorrow. We
do that through our words, our paintings, our drawings, our songs,
and any other means we can birth our pain and suffering into the
world as a form of educational entertainment.
If love is but a mechanism to ensure a
mating process, then an artist's pain is only a mechanism to ensure
purity for a better tomorrow. The next time you see that painting
that disturbs you, or you read a passing paragraph in a book, or you
hear a song that hits an emotion you don't want to experience take it
as a sign to pay more attention. The reason you feel the way you do
about it isn't because the painting is ugly, those are easily
ignored, it is because you don't want to face the emotion the
painting is making you feel.
-Dustin S. Stover
And don't forget, if you want to support my writing then buy my collection of short stories.
Kindle: Happiness in a Void of Darkness
No comments:
Post a Comment