ON IMPRESSIONISM, KETCHUP, AND THE WAY WE LOOK AT PEOPLE

As I sit here on my couch and simultaneously contemplate the meaning of life and the latest episode of Dancing With the Stars, I think it's high time that I start taking this blog thing a little more seriously. I've been neglecting it. It's sad. It's gathered dust. AND IT DESERVES TO BE TAKEN CARE OF. 

Like a baby. Or...some other dusty thing.

Before I begin, I would like to clarify that while I haven't been writing anything in this lovely little corner of the internet for a few months, that doesn't mean I simply had nothing to write about. No, that was certainly not the case. I actually had a lot of ideas. I mean, I thought of, like, at least more than three things in the last few months...I think. So now that school is out and I have a lot more time on my hands and a whole lot less #responsibility, I'm going to play "ketchup" on here and write everything I've been meaning to for months.

(Enjoy this picture of a ketchup bottle reacting to the news that I'm writing again, and pardon the sad, sad pun I just made regarding the contents of his bottle.)
 
Anywho, back in February I had an experience, or rather a group of experiences one day that I wanted to write about. It began in my memoir-writing class.

In this class, the objective was for each of us to compose six short memoirs about our lives that we would somehow weave together under a sort of theme and turn in at the end of the semester. We were split into groups of five to share our work with early on, but one day our professor jumbled everyone up so we were with people we'd never shared anything with before. And the result was incredibly thought-provoking to me.

Typically when you meet people in a social setting, especially in college classes, all you find out about them the first time you converse are their names, where they're from, what they're studying, and pretty much anything else you can think of that is not very informative at all. It's the surface questions, the things we ask to "get to know people" when they don't actually help you get to know them at all. Learning that Sally from St. George, Utah is studying Elementary Education is just going to allow you to stereotype her and not even consider the other facets of her that make her who she is. We look at these broad facts and assume we know the details on an almost daily basis.

But in this class, it was entirely different. As I sat in that cluster of desks with four complete strangers whom I had never spoken to, we got to know each other on a completely different level. I learned that the older woman in our group had struggled with self-image issues her whole life, that the shy, reserved guy sitting across from me was once mugged at knifepoint while serving an LDS mission, and that the girl to my left almost killed herself overdosing on sleeping pills a few years ago. The complex, intimate details of these people's lives, the things that affect them and make them who they truly are were what I was privileged to see. That's how I got to know them. There were no trite, so-where-are-you-from discussions, no discussions of majors and minors and school. I walked away from class that day dwelling on the information we had shared with one another. Fifty minutes before that they had been complete strangers to me, and now I understood them on a deep, intimate level—a level I normally don't reach with new acquaintances for months. It was a strange experience.

After class I walked to the museum on campus in order to complete an Art History assignment. We had to choose a painting and analyze practically everything about it, so I took my time wandering around and looking for the perfect piece to write about. After a while I found myself lingering around the impressionist paintings and admiring the skillful technique artists use to create them—from far away, impressionist paintings appear to create a full scene rich with detail and easily discernible to the eye. But if you get up close, what you thought were obvious objects and landscapes grow muddled and confusing. You realize that the paintings are crafted by indecipherable strokes and blends of colors, and what you thought were flowers were nothing more than scattered, messy dabs of paint. You can't just walk past an impressionist painting and assume that you're truly seeing it—truly understanding it. You have to spend the extra time to get closer to it in order to appreciate what the artist has created. I found this illusion fascinating.

On the way back to my apartment, the sun setting and the majority of students heading home just as I was, I subconsciously devoted my attention to simply observing the people I passed on campus, noting their differences and wondering about their lives. What were their plans for the evening? Why were they here? Did they house secrets just as dark as some of those in my memoir workshop group? And all of a sudden all three of these events merged together in my head in a clear moment of understanding that took me off guard.

We are impressionist paintings. Each of us. From a distance, people look at us and categorize us into the neat, tidy files in their brains that exist to help them make sense of the world. We all do this, whether we like it or not: "Tool," "The Former Cheerleader," "The Sheltered Girl," and my personal favorite, "Hipster." But the truth is, each of us is so much more than any of these labels—whether we choose to acknowledge that reality or not. I got a taste of that in my memoir class. I got to see the tiny, muddled brushstrokes that made those total strangers who they were. The underlying layers of paint that formed the outer surface which everyone sees. Not everyone gets that opportunity. Often, it takes months or even years for people to let others close enough to see those details on their canvases.

So what does that mean for us? Am I saying we should walk around asking insanely personal questions to everyone we meet? No. Don't do that. Like really...that would be creepy. The point I want to make is that we should try a little harder to look at people differently. To see that disheveled person on the side of the road and not assume we know all about his situation purely because of his appearance. Because just like you, every person you come in contact with has experienced thousands of days and moments that have composed the thousands of little brushstrokes of his or her personality—the details of their lives that you'll only know by getting close to them, not from an observational distance. You have to make the effort to get close to someone if you want to see that, and often that's extremely difficult to do. It's much easier to walk past that girl with bleach-blond hair and Oompa Loompa skin and label her as a fake, self-absorbed bimbo. And that's why we do it all the time.

But it would be impossible for us to get to know all of the people on this planet on the incredibly deep, emotional level necessary to truly understand them. So in lieu of spending all of your time in the museum with your nose an inch away from every painting, I ask that you at least realize that there's a lot more to each piece than you can see from ten feet away. If we all tried to look at those around us with this mentality, I think we'd live in a much happier, much more understanding environment. We'd be slow to judge, quick to forgive, and think about others and their struggles a whole heck of a lot more than ourselves.

And that can only be a good thing.