BeHolden

There’s a trend in how I’ve been engaging myself with entertainment this year.  It all centers around things I first discovered over ten years ago.  I’ve re-watched movies and TV shows, I’ve re-read book series, I’ve re-played video games that I first discovered around the time I was in college between 1996 and 2001, and just after.

Nice as it is to revisit these old passers of time, I find myself curious as to why I’m so locked into this pattern.  It’s as if I’m trying to rediscover some piece of myself I once lost.  Maybe I had something figured out then and I’m trying to reclaim it.  Maybe I’m trying to center myself, compare my attitudes and opinions of today with those of fifteen years ago.  Maybe I want to determine whether my values have gone astray.

Whatever the reason, I had the culmination of these things last Wednesday when I visited the Art Institute of Chicago for the second time in as many weeks.  My first time there was at the age of sixteen on a trip from Texas with my high school choir.  My girlfriend and I were walking through the place when we happened on a particular painting that struck me.

I had never been a particular appreciator of art, but the immense level of detail of this piece engaged me in a way nothing else had that day.  The picture was of a pipe, not dissimilar from one I saw my father use when I was growing up.  The grain of the wood caught my eye, as did the deep reddish glow of the coals as they burned.  A thin trail of smoke drifted lazily from the bowl.  But what burned brightest in my memory was the single French sentence written beneath the picture.

My girlfriend asked me to translate.  I was taking a French class (because German was full and Spanish was dumb), and the sentence was simple enough.  Basic stuff.  There was an encouraging challenge in her tone as well.  Her mother and her sister had been trying to get her to break up with me on the basis that I was shiftless and didn’t deserve her.  She didn’t disbelieve them (and they weren’t wrong), but still she gave me every opportunity to prove myself worthy.

The sentence made no sense.  I stared at it for a full minute, certain I had made a mistake.  My girlfriend’s eyes, hopeful, bore into me as my faced twitched with difficulty.  Finally I concluded I had the sentence correct and uttered the translation: “This is . . . not a pipe.”

But it was a pipe!  I could see that.  It was obvious.  The contradiction forced me to pay more attention to the object itself.  The more I looked, the more it looked like a pipe.  Was I being tricked?  Was a camera there to record my face gone all wonky and warped like a funhouse mirror?  My girlfriend wondered whether I was pulling a stupid prank, which had been a long time habit for me.

The image and the experience stuck with me, and over the years I visited Chicago twice more before I finally moved here.  Each time was a few years after the last, and each time I wondered through the halls of the Art Institute with the purpose of stumbling upon the painting.  “Here I stand again,” I would think, and reflect on all the events of my life that had occurred since the last time I stood and looked at that particular painting.  It was a way of making watershed moments in my life, taking stock of myself and measuring how far I’d come since the last time I’d stood and observed that particular painting.

But this time I observed it and felt – nothing in particular.  Maybe I had built up the moment too much.  After living here five years, this was the first time I’d carved out the opportunity to get there.  I had wanted to, I had tried, but I didn’t want to go unless I had someone with me to mark the occasion (which didn’t make sense, since I had no one with me the last time I was there in 2005).  This time all I could think about was the first time I’d seen it.  The two subsequent visits had been reduced to hazy memories; I remember other elements of those trips far better.

Maybe it’s because I’ve lived more in my last five years than I lived in the previous ten.  I’ve grown more.  Learned more about myself.  Risen to – and conquered – more challenges.  Become more responsible, more disciplined.  Taken more risks.  And I find that the more I change, the more I like who I am.  I’m not ashamed of wasting my life, watching it go by.

And maybe it’s to do with the time I wasted when I graduated with my Bachelor’s in 2001.  Those were the beginning of my Wasting Years, the period in which I took no chances with my life and affected no changes.  I ran away or hid from challenges, burying myself in the fantastic lives of fictional characters rather than constructing a life of my own.

Just like when I was sixteen.

 

I got my Master’s degree this year, and if I’m not careful, I could fall into the same pattern of stagnation.  Perhaps I’m revisiting these old companions of mine not to reclaim a piece of myself, but rather it’s my subconscious warning me that I could end up burrowed in my apartment for days at a time, only doing the bare minimum it takes to keep the roof over my head and never aspiring to anything greater.

Okay, then.   Message received and interpreted.  Warning recognized.  It’s time to do new things, so that the next time I find myself before a painting pretending to be a pipe, I’ll have more to say about who I’ve become during the in-between times.