Lately, I’ve been feeling like Benjamin Braddock in "The Graduate," sipping on a warm beer and lying back on my inflatable pool lounger, floating across the uncertainty that comes with senior year. However, I’ve been desperately trying to shake this cliché anxiety-induced apathy and live in the excitement of this liminal moment. It’s just really hard, though.
In confronting this amorphous uncertainty, I’ve found that there is little else to grab onto but myself—and that’s the scary part. During a recent procrastinatory Netflix binge in which I watched all of "Orange is the New Black," I was struck by a quote from the protagonist, Piper, as she explains that the scariest part of prison for her is not other people but “coming face-to-face with who you really are.” Though the Gothic Wonderland can feel claustrophobic at times, I am by no means implying that I feel imprisoned. I only feel that as 'game-time' draws near, calling me to reflect on just about everything, my personal insecurities have come bubbling forward.
Life’s foundations are never anything but gray, but we do everything possible to try to forget that. We plan. We prepare. We do what we can with what we have. Then, in turn, we benchmark our lives with respect to the black and white. There is comfort in this simplicity, but that doesn’t make it genuine or real, and it doesn’t make things any less tenuous. Change is a guarantee that renders both success and failure temporary. A Rudyard Kipling quote displayed outside the center courts at Wimbledon exemplifies this futility of measuring oneself by traditional standards: “Triumph and disaster, treat those two impostors both the same.” Both concepts are static and final but life is always dynamic, a living and breathing animal.
As millennials, we were born into the 'information age' where there are seemingly endless answers, and we expect our lives to work as effortlessly and cleanly as our technology. It is only in 'crunch-time' that we are forced to confront the dynamism of life, to realize that things are much more complex than we would like to believe and to stare down the barrel of the gun of those things that scare us, seeing ourselves reflected back. I’m working up the nerve to live the questions as opposed to the answers, to revel in the chasing and the lucid dreaming up of possibilities.
Art eternally lives the questions. It examines the contradictions that live side by side in objects. It makes barriers more porous, points out what you don’t know and complicates what you think you do. Most importantly, ultimately subjective, art helps you understand yourself. When you approach a piece of work, you bring yourself to it and inflate it with meaning. Consider the ways we talk about art: we love it; we hate it; our favorite movies and albums are like old friends to whom we turn when we are in need of comfort, understanding and synthesis. Art cannot exist in a vacuum. It needs you. In this subjectivity, art derives its power; one work can appeal to a vast number of individuals but will do so in a way unique to each person.
Listen to the art and to those parts of yourself that make you uneasy, or that you don’t understand. Ask yourself, “Why?”Towards the end of "The Graduate," Benjamin turns to his girlfriend Elaine and, exasperated, voices his concerns about his future: “It's like I was playing some kind of game, but the rules don't make any sense to me. They're being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.” We often avoid those things that make us uneasy when those are the things we most need to examine, the things that speak the most to who we really are. Sit with the questions and the discomfort. Then make your own rules.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.