I was listening to Pandora on the train heading to meet some friends after work about a year ago and "Peace of Mind" came on. I was walking down the steps of the Brown line stop at Diversey, and my heart skipped a beat, and then another, and then I got chills. I had listened to that song probably hundreds of times in my life, Boston's album Boston is one of my favorites. In all those times I'd heard it before, it had just been a good song that I could crank up in my truck while cruising through the Pourdre Canyon outside of Fort Collins. Though I had heard the words, I hadn't lived the experiences that it spoke about and so it was just a song. That day getting off the train, all the sudden I could empathize with the emotions; I knew what they were talking about. I could relate with the lyrics of feeling stuck and uncertain where to go next, wanting to run but staying where I was at. The lyrics reached out and slapped me because I’d finally had gained experience in life. Remember that phrase from The Matrix where Morpheus says to Neo “Unfortunately, no one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself”? When I was younger and I heard that line, it just seemed bad-ass. Later it seemed cliché in the sense that somebody was telling me I was too dumb to understand a concept (that was back when I was 21 and I was the smartest guy in the room with a 2.8 GPA to prove it!). Now I look back at that line and I get the same feeling as I did that day at the Diversey Brown Line. Not in the sense that I’m just a copper top powering my machine overlords (…okay, maybe just a little…); no in the sense that there is so much in this world that nobody can tell you about, you have to experience it, live it, touch it, feel it. It’s almost like you have to build an emotional/experiential vocabulary.
Just as an infant builds its vocabulary, she’s able to interact with the people around her more and learn more quickly as a result, maybe us young adults need to work on building our emotional/experiential vocabulary so that we can gain more knowledge from those around us. This is where I might again agree with LINCHPIN where it states that the US Education system is teaching us wrong. We focus so much of our learning years on reading, writing, math, spelling, derivatives, and the like. Then a few of us take art classes or music classes as electives. All those core classes, although critically important to build the necessary fundamental skills doesn’t give us the chance to learn how to cultivate our emotional/experiential vocabulary. We may read a book like The Invisible Man and explain to us why it’s emotional, and we might think we understand, but I’d bet you that just like me listening to “Peace of Mind” with the experiential vocabulary to understand it more, if we could be taught how to find that vocabulary, it would mean so much more. That’s where art comes in; it teaches you to get in touch with that emotional being inside of you.
Additionally, people like me get into the workplace and start trying to master everything and expect to go to the next level as soon as we’ve master the functional aspect, because that’s how we were taught. You took a class, you passed, you moved on. That’s the functional part of the job though. What about the emotional/experiential side? Do we even think about that part of our work? Does anybody even know how to explain what that is? It seems like such an amorphous concept, so perhaps that’s why so few people ever take the time to grasp it, play with it and understand it. I know that I have neglected it to date, but luckily I’m young and can attempt to see the matrix for myself!
No comments:
Post a Comment