Fear goes hand in hand with living. I think it was one of the hardest realizations I ever had to confront. There’s an aesthetic to living a fearless life, to being strong, and there’s a power they give to those able to live a life without fear shackling their movements, one that I’ve come to hate. I believe that it is almost impossible to exist while being aware in this world; without feeling that creeping sensation of unease, of fear. Not terror, not phobias, but fear; the intense emotion of anticipating something bad, of anticipating danger.
I believe there’s no way to live calmly without it, not with the way the world is. Don’t we shake as we write our words? Don’t singers’ voices waver as they sing? We often push ourselves to the breaking point; art is fear, art is sweat, blood, and tears. We want to create with the weight of the world on our shoulders. We want to create, voice our feelings through art, and somehow voice the world’s feelings through it too. We want to create for ourselves but we live for the recognition, the impact our creations can have on others.
We live both afraid of being seen and with fear of going unnoticed.
I watch it, in the way things last a day, a week, a month, and then fight tooth and nail to live after. Creations battle to breathe life to themselves after being brought to the light. They, unlike us, don’t have independent systems that urge them to survive, that have instincts and fight or flight. They live by the sole thread that consumers tug. Once the tugging stops, their hearts might as well stop too. I feel like even creations are aware of their fickle time, that their creators too are so affected by the well oiled warm machine the world has become, that once creations are done, they are born with the impending doom that their time is limited. Never guaranteed.
While reading The Great Divorce by C.W Lewis, I remember being so struck by one of the passages that even nowadays I sometimes open the book to reread it. “Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till.” As someone who creates and has every once in a while felt the pressure of creating solely to meet expectations instead of creating just because; the line has stuck with me. The way in which we see art today, in any form, dwindles the very way we can create it. This part of the book shows a beautiful way of expressing how we lose the way we chose to do art, “You’re forgetting. You loved painting only as a means of telling about light.” It made me wonder how many times we forget that we chose to write, to paint, to create, as a means of telling, of showing the sky, feelings, the world. How many times have we lost the feeling of why we started to the overwhelming pressure of simply creating anything? How many times did we forget to gaze at the sky for ourselves, to feel for ourselves instead of only measuring it just to translate it into paper?
I won’t say I’m innocent, I too succumbed to the fast-moving world we’re currently experiencing. Social media (Tiktok, for example), music, art, movies, and series have all become a form of escapism, not that there’s anything wrong with that. However, it came to a point where we were watching things unfold but we weren’t really digesting them; or we were, but only digesting them to get rid of them faster. Even life felt fast, work, living. Everything started to feel fleeting.
In the way videos became small clips, movies lost meaning, and songs became shorter. We were all cutting our attention spans, whether intentionally or not. It felt almost like a need, to watch more, to keep scrolling, like a competition we unknowingly took part in. It all became numbers and nonsense, in a way. As more media was created, the more timeless we felt, and not in a good way, but in a sense that we felt as if we needed to consume all of it, whether we were able to maintain it or not, whether we found it memorable or not. It felt as if we were running out of time. It was a two way street too, the more rapidly we consumed, the more rapidly creators had to move. It’s a never ending cycle, and I felt as if it was starting to bleed into my, and everyone’s, daily lives.
I began driving, uncaring of the speed and the road, only capable of thinking about my destination. Late. Even when I left an hour earlier, I felt late, as if the world was moving faster than I ever could. Do I read, do I listen to music, or should I write? Am I capable of doing them all at once? It felt as if I needed to both be aware of everything and nothing all at the same time. Everything was too fast, yet I felt slow, even as I scrolled ceaselessly, even as I read books in a timely manner, even as I was able to listen to music as soon as it was released, it still felt as if I was stuck on a treadmill bumped up to the highest setting (on an incline) and, in my peripherals, I could feel all that I was consuming passing me by. I got scared. My wake up call was when I started to feel like my very existence was getting swept away by the way we were living, by the way we were creating, consuming, and enjoying things.
I could barely remember the times I went out, or the moments I’d experienced. It was as if my memories–not only those that saved art, music, or books–but those with me at the core, hangouts with friends and family, they started to feel fleeting too. The weight of years felt inexistent when I could barely remember what had happened one or two years ago. Too focused on the next thing, on the future, that I was barely caring to remember a fruitful past or barely enjoying a hopeful present. It was then that it hit me, how dangerous was this line that we were crawling within. I became aware of this fleetingness and it jump-started a state of desperation, a need–a fear–of more, of wanting to work to remember. I wanted to remember, to enjoy, to take a pause, to take things slow. I became obsessed with it, wanting to make things everlasting in the easy drive thru that by the end only held a can waiting for you to drop what you had enjoyed.
RM’s ‘Still Life’ Music Video Still
It hit me harder when books, like the one previously mentioned, and artists I loved talked about this overwhelming desperateness. I remember reading one of RM’s interviews (BTS’s Leader) and feeling both comforted and sad that he too understood this feeling of wanting to remember, of wanting to stop and enjoy, but mostly, as a creator, of wanting to create something that not only mattered, but that lasted. “It really feels like everything is thrown out after just a few years with how fast the world changes, so it makes me think I want to attain some kind of everlastingness.” He had said in that interview. I remember wanting to sit down, have a drink with him and tell him that I had a dying wish, a desperate desire, that I too wanted to make things timeless. Tell him I had finally noticed that I was letting myself be swept away with the fast moving current and I was desperately swimming against it. In that moment, I wanted to comfort him, and in a way myself, by perhaps letting him know that part of his music—of BTS’ music—had become timeless to me. It’s become engraved in memories I was reluctant to let go, and important to parts of my life that I had decided to hold onto, if only to tell the quick changing world that it was not breaking me, at least not anymore.
I started reading a fantasy book, Jade City by Fonda Lee, and my small section of escapism while reading fantasy novels was shattered by the second chapter where the author was describing the metropolis, and its people, as strained at its seams. “There was an undercurrent, Hilo thought, of everything running a bit too dangerously fast all the time…teetering just on the edge of out of control, disrupting the natural order of things.” I remember highlighting the lines, and breathing out “I need to remember this, this is exactly how my present feels” and here I am sharing it, because it matters.
As a consumer, I became mindful and protective of the things I was enjoying. It was more than the quickness with which I was enjoying them, but the state of mind I was enjoying them with. I felt that creations needed respect, that they did not need to be consumed and discarded, later forgotten by the end of one playlist or at the back end of a movie theater. I felt that even our own experiences were owed a more rigorous remembering. My mind and my feelings came to a point where the reckless care of all of it and the dismissal to that fleetingness released anger within me. I couldn’t understand the glorifying of any of it anymore, of not remembering, of shamefully not caring, of dismissing feelings, of not caring for someone’s art, for someone’s music enough to add it to a playlist, to write about it, to review it months from now or years from now. It was maddening, because I was at a place in my life, especially with my own memories and my own existence, where I couldn’t breathe with the weight of wanting to remember, the guilt of letting things be discarded, forgotten. I wanted to hold onto the pieces of everything that I could because it all deserved that tug of life every once in a while.
I swear I even dreamt of it, of these memories that felt blurry but that were tugging at me as if they knew, as if they wanted me to care because no one else was. They were begging me to bring them to life.
Image from Pinterest
There’s very little we can do when a current as harsh and unforgiving as society works its way through our everyday lives. It’s not our fault, though. We’re living this life where everything feels as if we’re at the edge of the shore, feet planted in the sand and the waves keep coming, burying our feet further in, washing the grains of sand away and replacing them, again and again but we’re unaware, because they all look the same. It’s hard, even as I write this, even as I know, even this moment feels fleeting, even this article feels like it may have its expiration date sooner than I would like. I write and think: will anyone read this? Will they think it matters? Will they save it, and reread it?
Even when I’m aware of my heart racing at an abnormal pace, even as I’ve worked to move against it, to remember it, live it, breathe it, to hear its heartbeat. Even as I know, I sometimes forget. I sometimes let the current wash me away and pull me down. Then I swim upwards, gasping for breath, and write it down. This, how could I forget this? I repeat to myself. I make myself remember; I glue the photos to my journal, write my feelings of the moment beside them, play the song that pried me open on repeat, watch the movie my mother put for me when I was three, reread that book that I thought I remembered from page to stitch. I go watch the sunrise, and I tell myself it’s okay to simply watch it. Tomorrow, I breathe, tomorrow I can sit and paint it, write about it.
Today I can live it, breathe it. Let the moment run at 60 or 100 beats per minute.