I am going to start a series where I discuss a particular work of art and engage in off the cuff storytelling about it. To start I’ll begin with the painting below of a person walking down a snowy street in the twilight.

Painting “Snow in Vladimir. Twilight” by Evgeny Vagin

In the painting the white snow is draped over the buildings on a simple street that looks to be nearby a wooded area. Out of the lamp light is a rustic glow, and overlooking the town are the towers of what look to be two churches. They seem to be watching over the town as if providing protection. The person in the painting I feel is in a sense of contemplation as he or she walks along a quiet street.

I imagine inside of the buildings nearby people are having conversations over dinner, laughing, or reading a book in their own thoughts. Perhaps the building directly to the right in a business of some kind, and in the upper story of the building is a desk where the shop owner has closed up for the day. Objects lay in suspended wait for the return of the owner tomorrow, as still and quiet as the ice outside. For some reason a couple of days ago the owner brought his cat over but got mad at it after it jumped on the desk and knocked over the coffee. I imagine that the store owner rushes in and out regularly with thoughts consumed about business and money, completely unaware of the beauty that is outside their shop.

If this stranger walking on the street were a real person, you might wonder what sort of thoughts were going through their mind. I’d like to think nothing trivial, and nothing too deep either. Maybe just a simple appreciation of the stillness, an exhalation and a moment of recognition about being alive. A wondering glance goes into the trees to the left as the glow of the lamp post contrasts the darkening thicket that is descending into its sleepy night as the twilight fades. The person in the painting walks on and then reaches their destination. In my mind they are on their way home after running an unexpected errand. When they arrive they get on with things and the moment is gone, only a memory and impression in the mind.

In the early 2000s as young man in my first semester of my bachelors I was attending a community college while living by myself in a small efficiency apartment on the south side of Austin Texas. One night in late October or early November was taking a night class at an old high school which was probably built in the seventies or earlier. It had that old school feeling that anyone born before 1990 likely remembers, and indefinable quality pasted in the manilla colored walls. Not exactly musty, but a little bland with a strange energy moving through it, maybe the energy of people who had once roamed the hallways with thousands of things on each one of their minds. One night after class let out out I had a conversation with a classmate about the course assignment and then we started into small talk until it became later. After saying goodbye and parting ways, now almost 10pm, just about everyone had left except for the night staff. I walked through the old hallways and out the door feeling an eerie emptiness of the building.

Moving through the double doors I entered the sidewalk hearing the door click behind me and a low rolling thunder moving hauntingly in the sky somewhere in the distance. Because of the difficult parking situation at the time I had parked my car far down another street, and at first it was only lightly sprinkling so I decided to walk it. It was about to rain, I could tell, but I thought I could get to my car before the downpour. But sure enough, after getting some distance from the building it started to rain down with a sudden crack of lightning. I was far enough from my car that if I ran towards it I would be soaked and my books would get wet. It just so happened that there was a small wooden shack nestled in trees and brush nearby that I often passed walking to the school. To avoid this torrent of rain I ran under the shack and took shelter here. I stood there alone in this small little shack as the rain dropped outside. Thankfully this was 2003, years before smartphones (back then I didn’t even have a flip phone), so I didn’t automatically check Facebook or my text messages as people would today. I say thankfully because such an instinctual action common today would have caused me to miss out on a vivid moment. Instead, I stood there alone in that long mysterious night taking shelter as the water pattered on the ceiling above, not knowing who or what may be around me or how long I would be there. There was even something slightly scary about this old shack at night. It was small enough to tell for certain that I was alone in it, but dark enough to spark instinctual feelings of caution inside of me, as if claws might reach out from the dirt to grab me. To be honest, I found it kind of fun at eighteen being caught in a rainstorm living on my own.

There was no door just an open area so I stood near the entrance. I looked around as the rain fell, concrete buildings in the distance, a stairwell, dark bushes and a chain length fence over a sharp hill drop. It was a place I had never been before, a situation I had not seen. Over time my mind started to enjoy standing there and looking at the rainy scene before me. I was a small town boy, and here I was stuck in my first rainstorm in the city. You may laugh, but to me at the time it meant something, and I was having fun.

At some point I began to be fixated on something very small and innocuous, yet enchanting. A small distance from where I stood was a simple street light shining a golden halogen light into the pavement, and center of the light draped across a small puddle on the ground. Here before me was dancing gold, a hidden treasure nestled in everyday life. There was something about it that captivated me, I almost didn’t want the rain to stop. Sometimes exotic and eternal in this old rainy gold. In this representation was my mind’s heart was opened to a feeling carried down through the ages. There I was, present in life, with hidden treasure discovered before me. It was beautiful, and I believe something in that moment changed me, if only in a small way, forever.

Forth while, time came into the stars

Quivering over the immense eternity

Then came unsorted small white houses

Time clicked by in tiny hours

Came and depart forever

And behind the passing, lay shreds of life 

The etchings marked in memory

Love bathes inside of us burning forever

Under sunny Saturdays, brandishing passions

Through family, friends, and the search for meaning  

As our works cannot conqur

Though they be full of gold 

Pure shining through autumn leaves

Heavy sour struggles over humid hills of bore

Driving by red tomatoes, and industrial efforts

And swirling dream-stuff, secretly inside of you

Their manifested works create

Feeling too often, fallen like fantasies

Discontent angels breathe

Over old contenents of yore

Wavering memories of ancestors

That elegantly scatter

Into green rolling hills 

And creaking home floors

Tumbling gusts approach

To scatter all and make anew

Still alive, is my love for you

In this wilderness, this celestial wisdom

We have dances like charades of mind 

All around misleading 

We’ll move into these grassy starry fields

Hand in hand we yonder go

Years far into the future

You’ll wonder what has become of me

As I’ll think of you

Remembrance in our sleep 

Time moves on

Banches of a tree twice so strong 

Like efforts we made to belong

Weighed down by the world

Bathing soft 

In gentle sunlight

A truth I see in you

These days, we made it through

I hardly know how

Have you ever sat at a red light where a stream of cars are driving by at an angle where you can see the people inside and wondered what the people may be thinking?  Or noticed a light on in a building in the distance and considered how the inhabitants may be feeling?  Everyone has their own unique experiences, their own personality. They’ve all loved, cried, been angry.  

All around us are individuals much like ourselves, yet also different and unique. They’ve all had things that make them laugh, dreams, sorrow, moments of happiness, and appreciations.  Many people passing you by on any given day could become close friends if you had the time to get to know them. 

The dictionary of obscure sorrows created a word called Sonder, which is defined as “the realization that everyone has a story.” Take a moment to watch the short video below.

“Sonder. You are the main character—the protagonist—the star at the center of your own unfolding story. You’re surrounded by your supporting cast: friends and family hanging in your immediate orbit. Scattered a little further out, a network of acquaintances who drift in and out of contact over the years. But there in the background, faint and out of focus, are the extras. The random passersby. Each living a life as vivid and complex as your own. They carry on invisibly around you, bearing the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs and inherited craziness. When your life moves on to the next scene, theirs flickers in place, wrapped in a cloud of backstory and inside jokes and characters strung together with countless other stories you’ll never be able to see. That you’ll never know exists. In which you might appear only once. As an extra sipping coffee in the background. As a blur of traffic passing on the highway. As a lighted window at dusk.”

Your life can go many directions, and every fork in the road leads to different people in your life, and thus different experiences that would shape you in different ways. Perhaps years ago had you gone made a different choice on where to go for lunch you might have met someone that changed who you are today.

Try this sometime, go out somewhere and spot a random person walking in the distance and imagine that you are them. You look different, feel different, have experience things in a different way. You know different people, have different ambitions, have different sorrows, experience everything in a different way. And then think about ways that you may feel similar, and have the same sort of feelings in various situations.

Now imagine they spot you out of the corner of their eye while going about their day and move on by paying no mind, the same way you normally do to most people that move through your own field of vision. Consider all of the things you’ve experience in your life that were significant to you, your personal story and what it means.

They go their way, you go yours.

You’ll probably never see each other again, or if you do, you won’t even know it. But in taking some time to consider this, you’ll better appreciate the importance of the unnamed people you encounter.

Things are going on all around us, molecules and microscopic interactions surround us, stars are in the sky, people are experiencing life. Things are meaningful.

Likewise, you’re emotions are uniquely yours, and your journey is one of a kind. Nobody else in the world experiences the world exactly as you do and nobody ever will again. Your own experiences are unique and because of this they are worthy of treasuring, and so are everyone else’s.

I live across from a small nature preserve full of tall old trees and a creek hidden somewhere between them. From my balcony I can see the whole trunks of the trees sway a little when gusts of wind come by, and the tops of the trees dance rhythmically to the wind that flows through. Sometimes the winds whip around the walls of where I live too making sharp whistling noises, and between me and the trees each blade of grass moves within the flow of the earth. Perhaps the wind is a writer, and it weaves like cursive letters and creates its story into the contours of each tree and each person it touches, all unique, telling a long story with each moment that we witness this moving force.

Cursive is a style of writing that I have not used in many years. Some time ago the public education system in the United States decided to stop teaching cursive to the children or to teach it only very minimally. It’s become outdated, they said, today is an era of information and technology. In this day in age it would be a waste to spend time teaching kids how to write the English language in a style that is no longer used in modern society. It is better to focus on practicality and other skills that are applicable to the workforce.

Perhaps they are right. It is true that cursive is no longer a skill that is needed in the world today, unless you are in a very niche profession it is very unlikely that you will be required to ever write a sentence in cursive all your life. From a practical standpoint it’s hard to argue that students should spend hours on it, and somewhat ironically the penmanship style of cursive was originally invented as a way to write faster and more efficiently. Yet while I can’t claim to write in cursive regularly myself (I probably could not write the fully alphabet in cursive correctly anymore), I can’t help but think that something is being lost by this removal of cursive from the education system. The cursive style of writing carries with it a beauty within its calligraphy. It makes information into art, thoughts into aesthetics.

I remember having some assignments back in school in which I had to write entire essays in cursive. It was challenging to do so but I also remember enjoying it, because there was a bit of art to it. Sitting with a paper and pencil drawing out the curves of each letter, creating the connections and letting a piece of creativity flow from within. I’d make some sentences a little wider than others, and some a bit sharper. I know intuitively even as a child that I was putting a part of myself into these sentences, and not just in what I was saying but also in the way it was being constructed. Imprints of my psychological nature were being expressed within language and through art at the same time. It created a sense of ownership with my writing and the conveyance of my thoughts.

And now we just type in letters on a keyboard, or a phone, or even just ask ChatGPT to do it for us. I’m no luddite, but part of me wonders if the efficiency that we’ve gained comes at a cost.

I have some old letters that my great grandfather wrote to his lover and future wife back in the 1890s. The sentences were expressive and resembled a kind of classical art, and such art resembles organic objects of beauty. It’s hard to imagine that our souls could be as engaged in writing a heart felt letter over a text message as one might be penning a letter in cursive. When writing by hand at times the shapes and angles reflect the feelings of the writing much better than an emoji ever could.

Compare this to writing done on a computer. Every letter is exactly the same, a standardized utilitarian backdrop used to write out our thoughts. It’s frowned upon to use different fonts while writing, and it is considered good form to keep everything uniform. It makes sense, too. It is the utilitarian answer to the complexities and confusions that might come from individualization of paper writing. And especially today, people’s handwriting is so bad that you could scarcely understand what people are trying to say if we were all exchanging paper everywhere.

A solution is a solution, and efficiency is efficiency. Yet, when I look out over the trees near my house, what draws my eyes to linger is nothing utilitarian or efficient, but something I draw from the outside in that makes me feel human. When I quiet my mind among places of natural beauty, I feel a continuity between a past long gone which flows through my veins and a harmony with something far greater than the civilization I live in.

It seems that it may not be coincidental that the loss of cursive coincided with the depopularization of classical art, literature, and architecture. Today, the art world seems to value performative spectacle over careful representations of beauty. Postmodern literature values a crash, gritty realism over abstract romanticism. Big strip malls and neon signs have replaced the classical buildings and etchings in stones seem in old downtowns, and large towers of glass now conceal the artistic design of older architectural structures.

I’m not saying it’s bad. All efficiency has purpose, but it is worthwhile to ask ourselves this question and whether or not it’s really worthwhile. Uniformity creates simplicity, while individuality creates complexity.

Despite the machine like nature we often create society to function as, we are all still humans and inherently social creatures of emotions. And perhaps on some level the idea behind all of this efficiency is to expedite the path towards meaningful connections with others. Because, despite all of the efficiency and uniformity, this sameness will never do away with the individualism of people around us. This is a blessing. We all have unique shades to our personality, and are all on a special journey through life that is all of our own. People are always changing in subtle ways, stretching and contracting aspects of self in reaction to the every moving nature of life. The valves of our voices are all a little different, and when we laugh with one another our senses of humor are interwoven within frameworks that are all our own. This individuality is anything but efficient, it is what makes relationships difficult, but it is also what makes it all worthwhile. We fall in love with differences, because much in the same way as the cursive winds circle the trees, so does the cursive of our hearts wind through relationships and imprints a story in our soul.