Like art.

My entire life, I've hated artists. Especially the visual artist. I have colored them as people who dramatise life for personal effect and personal gain. I find their self-inflicted torture and actions which exarcerbate the circumstances of their self-inflicted torture, to be painfully superficial and vain. 

But a few months ago, in an epiphany where I realized that if we can really slow down and focus on the things around us; the scent, shape, colours, existence........the lucidity of their beauty and design accentuates our senses in ways that makes one feel like, "Life can stop at this slide, and I'll be framed this way, for eternity" - I realize how important the work of artists and poets and musicians are. In a world where everything has become so routine and mechanical, and where an insatiable materialistic drive for status and wealth is sugarcoated as a pursuit of happiness, it is truely the artists and poets and musicians who are the gatekeepers of paradise. 

The world of endless pursuits is an ugly and mechanical one. One lost in our own spin of our illussions and cravings. An ugly race that rips and tears everything in its path and paints them back with sorry patches designed by greed and lust. And it is those poets and artists and musicians that retain the wonder and charm of nature as it is - telling the stories that will remind us of our own humanity. The artists, must live. 

And a few months or weeks after having those thoughts, I enter my first art exhibition. Everything worth experiencing in life comes as a random act. And on the way to buy noodles, I walk into an art gallery - on the one day that I wear all-black, I walk into a studio of colours. And this is a first in my life -  I felt so elated in the presence of this exhibition. I have always imagined myself petrified in the midst of artistic thingy-thingies I cannot understand. (Creative people, in general,  petrify me - and worse if I had to be in the midst of people who seem to possess so much academic and technical knowledge of a subject.) I walked into the gallery on the third day of its launch - it was a quiet late afternoon, I was the only one there. I had the luxury of having the gallery manager all to myself to tell me about the paintings which delight me so much. - The art pieces were talking to me. They were frames of my happy moments in my life, captured and designed. Designed by hands that could never be mine but who interpreted my feelings and expressions through her hands.  Ahh...so this is why people spend a lot of money buying art and collecting them! I get it. I get it now. If you can't do it, pay for it to be done. :)

Rich people aren't stupid after all. They simply reached a point where money gave them the liberty to get out of that web of materialism the rest of the world is still spinning in, to swim to the banks and enjoy the stream flow past, instead of drowning in it. And rich people are thankful for the artists that offer them beauty; the artists that did not conform to the ugly stream of life, who persevered and preserved elements of inspiration, creativity, beauty, wonder and charm - things that are, when everything else is being destroyed and severed, worth paying for. 

In a life where everything is a chore and not an art, where every act is laborious and not a joy - artists preserve that fabric of existence that is truly Living - that which reminds us what life is really about. That life is coloured by the strokes you paint with the acts you do, that life is the voice of the song you sing with the words you speak, that life is the stage you narrate from with the story of your life. 

Have you ever bought something for relatively a lot of money - and wanting to thank the person for giving you the opportunity to spend your money in a way which allows you to acquire a symbolism of the beauty in living? I think I might be on the way to acquiring my first piece of art.