Sway, you river, as you please. Rush forward without turning back. Always onto unknown ends. Sway, you river, never the same.
Standing by the river bed, I had always tried to give meaning to the rush of the water past my feet. What can I learn from it? Looking to one end, I see it flowing towards me. On the other end, rushing away. Do the twists and turns have a lesson for me? Are they the hardships we face or just the randomness of the life we live? I had always thought of my life as the river, never as a mere observer of the flow. Putting myself as an observer watching the water flow in front of me, as if each molecule was a single human life on earth. Every human that had ever lived, ever human that will ever come to live. All in the same race towards an uncertain end, with no certainty of which twist comes next. Putting myself as an observer allowed me to move beyond time itself, to see that life will always go on.
This is an oriental lily I planted in my garden. You have never seen this one before. You have never smelt nor touched its silky petals. Had I told you it smells like the most beautiful blooms of Spring touching your soul, you have no choice but to believe me. The experience of the flower is mine alone, until you experience it. Our perception of life is based on experience. A life of imagination, as thrilling and creative as it may be, will be dull without the experience of something. What use is red without the precise wavelength that is decoded in our brain to perceive that rich, elegant color? Life is about experience. Experiencing the sound of a bird near you, the smell of a flower, the awe of a Mayan structure in Central America. Live your life with imagination and bring those imaginations to life through experience.
“So if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.”
Sean Maguire, Good Will Hunting (1997)
An Explorative Mind 