The Urban Optimist.

Exhausted and weak, I sat in my room after a long and painful run in the rain. I wondered, exasperated, at my increasingly sadistic tendencies, ‘Why on earth do I do this to myself? Why do I put myself through pain for no reason?’ Putting on my comfiest jumper and sipping a green tea, feeling warm on the inside, I suddenly realize: the painful things that we go through in our lives make us appreciate all the little pleasures.

If all we had was ‘good’, we would never recognize it as such.

I then listened to a song with voice recordings by philosopher Alan Watts, called ‘Hungry Ghost‘, and the lyrics at that moment resonated with me:

“If you are aware of a state which you call ‘is’, or reality, or life; this implies another state called isn’t. Or illusion, or unreality, or nothingness, or death. There it is: you can’t know one without the other. And so, as to make life poignant, it’s always got to come to an end. That is exactly, don’t you see, what makes it lively. Liveliness is change, is motion. You can see that you are always at the place you always are, only it keeps appearing to change.”

If we did not have illusion, we would not know reality. If we did not know pain, we would not know pleasure: or instead, we would change our definition of pain, just like a spoilt child that cries when he does not get exactly what he wants.

And I think that, deep down, we all recognize this, and is the exact reason why we sometimes act in ways that cause us some form of pain.

Everything is relative; everything can be exciting, everything can be mundane. Therefore, in order to be truly appreciated, everything needs to be balanced.

Those who try to live a life without sadness will never find happiness, and those that accept and embrace pain will be able to appreciate also the good things in life.

If I am day-dream believer who seeks comfort walking in the fields and catching butterflies, then my friend Giovanni is most at home at a bar attempting to solve his problems in the depths of a whiskey glass, seeking inspiration from the burning embers of his cigar, and writing poetry at 4am. 

Often our views my be the complete opposite of each other’s, but we both enjoy poetry and reading and writing; we both cling onto our beliefs that metaphors can exist in every day life. So have a look at his blog here, and see what you think.

I do not think

that we can ever look

objectively

at the past

like the historian thinks that he can.

For the defining characterisic of a moment in time

is the confusion

and uncertain complications

of the present.

People seem to view the idea of ‘art’ as something that these strange, mysterious people called artists create – as though they perform some sort of conjuring act; magicians with canvas and paint.

I was thinking about art and what it means – can anything truly be created? I remembered a quote I once read: ‘If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.’ 

In the same way that we ‘create’ an apple pie, all we are ever doing is mixing and manipulating a series of ingredients that we have selected. 

Therefore, art is surely just selection – the artist is someone who can look at the confused and messy world, and extract from it the purest of ideas: the tiniest points of interest that would otherwise go unknown.

And what’s more, the artist was able to recognize them as beautiful, when no-one else did.

Just like the Andy Warhol above; he has selected one second in time – a car crash – and conveyed through repetition and distortion, an interpretation of events. He has taken horror and chaos, and made it beautiful.

However, I think that most of all

from these pure ideas taken from a messy world, the artist forms an idea of truth.

And perhaps that truth is something that they created all alone.