It's All in Your Head: Why We Really Do Have The Time

     

       I've been thinking a lot lately about how school cultivates creativity for me. It didn't used to be that way. But recently I've been able to apply the things I've sort of cherry-picked from my learning to alter my perspective. I don't know what it is, maybe it's the idea of opportunity, the openness of the environment, or being surrounded by so much stimulation of people, of ideas, and of imagery. Every Fall I don't get outwardly or intensely excited about having to make the trip to school, because I see it being something that is taking an immense amount of time away from things I actually want to do. Though recently, I've realized that it is a break from the things I think are important but are actually just things that I do to simply pass the time, like religiously watching episodes of Catfish or mindlessly surfing my Facebook timeline for random funny videos of animals doing ridiculously adorable things.

       Those things, while entertaining, are just placeholders for things I actually want to be doing, but haven't had the right motivation for. I always say that because I also work so much while I'm in school, that I never have any time for my blog, to write a song, or to write a script, or spend time on myself. I don't have any room left for the things I love and want to do. But recently school has acted as a source for ambition and inspiration. Though I'm still restricted by the time I have to dedicate to assignments, projects, and regular classroom discussion, I think I've found a place where I can make some room for the right things because I do have the time, I just need to use it.

       The other day in my history of film class, I thought about how excited I was to incorporate a random quote my professor used into a song idea or a storyline. It was the moment he started talking about how a film strip consists of a series of still images alternating with black spaces. Maybe I'm a sucker for anything that sounds poetic, but it stuck with me. He continued talking about how the images you see in a theatre being projected onto the screen are your brain simply imagining the motion. Motion in film is an illusion, it does not exist. Then my professor quoted someone as saying that watching a movie in the theatre is really just a group of strangers sharing a collective dream. Film is merely a cinematic dream state that we lose ourselves in. It's all in your head. I bring this moment up because it was an extremely fascinating way to look at experience, but also because that idea holds a lot of truth to other things that pertain to life. A lot of it is just in our heads.

      And predating that moment, I had a talk with someone about loss aversion. How people spend all their time and energy into one thing that they may not want to be doing because they've already spent so much time and energy into it, they're afraid to lose the amount of work they've put into it. And despite knowing that this thing they're being loyal to isn't something they want to continue to pursue or that it may not get them where they want to be in the future, they just do it anyway even though they aren't gaining anything. It's about them not losing anything. We're suspended by these things. Then we just stay static. And I don't want to be that way. I want to "X" out all the things that aren't getting me to where I see myself in my life, my career, and my ultimate vision. School is a nice reminder of all of this, because it allows me to remember that there is an end goal once I'm finished. That I'm not confined to my position as a server or a retail worker, that those are merely my placeholders. I have all the time in the world, whether I'm choosing to realize it or not and I'm not going to lose out in the end because my head tells me otherwise.

XO,
Ariel

Click here to read more on movies as dreams that I thoroughly enjoyed :)