“Strands”

For the longest my belief was that I lacked the ability to connect with people, at the very least not as easily as it seemed to be with some people. Some people radiated so, and people flocked to them like moths to a flame, rather than feel envy I admired them for this gift and although I wasn’t born with it like some, I believed I could get better at it, just like any skill. Almost everyone seemed to have a redeeming quality to them, depths to be explored, and these beacons of light, radiators of charisma seemed to bring this out of them with no mind or effort. Meanwhile the brute that I was had to labor away, to pierce the cloak with which they hid their inner worlds, filled with beauty and wonder.

This drive to connect has no faded in slightest, far from it. Being thrust into the worlds of college, of corporate life, of adulthood, I’m more aware now than ever at the fact that we lack these connections, these threads to connect and bind us, these immaterial strands. Thus I make it one of my life goals, a lifetime long project, to unravel the constraints that bind us, the walls that imprison us, and learn to weave the threads or strands that connect us, and thus transcend things like race, socio-economic status, religion, distance, even our own self imposed, often mental, constraints.

This is why I not only gravitate towards to fields like sociology, psychology, and anthropology, which examine the what, why, and how of human nature through a myriad of lenses, but also art. Paintings, music, literature, to name a few, all which have the ability to transcend those previously mentioned restraints, think of concert in which the crowd, moved by the music, move, think, and feel as one or the writer whos translations of their works perforates the barriers of language and nationality, and strums the chord that binds us all, that of our humanity. So strands in some sense is the goal of ultimate empathy.

I don’t sketch much anymore but it’s certainly something I’d like to get better at, this is one of the ones I’m most proud of. One of my favorite animals, Owls, in this case a Great Horned Owl, an animal which represents wisdom, something I’ll need much of for this project.