I haven't driven in over six months

My modest shoe collection has been looking rather worn out lately. Black boots I bought over the summer have undergone identical corrosion. The three-month old cream-colored chucks I purchased from the Bancroft Clothing Company look like they are three-years-old. And let's not even talk about about the red Toms that my oldest sister bought for me as a beyond-belated eighteenth birthday gift last spring. After a ten-second, very deeply thought  out investigation, I found the culprit behind the deterioration of my shoes: walking.

I wish I could say that I am simply attempting leave a smaller carbon footprint on the soil of our atrophic planet. But that would be a lie. I honestly just have not had a functional car or insurance since I embarked on my European escapades last June. My seemingly selfless contributions to the save-our-beloved-mother-earth movement have merely been a positive externality of this travel restriction. Somewhat surprisingly though, I have been incredibly appreciative of the abortive state of my vehicle. In the past six months, I have mainly used my two feet to get myself from point A to points B-Z.

  
On the last Wednesday of break, I sat behind the wheel. And remembered how to drive (yes, that was a legitimate concern). When I was stuck in El Camino's ridiculous rush hour traffic, I mulled over this past six-month phase of my life without a vehicle and began to question my visual acuity. I purportedly have 20-20 vision, and yet my eyes have somehow failed to pick up on an endless number of details that I've spent nineteen years of my life unconciously overlooking while blankly starting out the windows of cars I've traveled in or driven myself. Fortunately, however, the art of walking has provided me with the unique opportunity to sharpen all five my senses to new and improved degrees.

I have lived in Palo Alto essentially my whole life - well, at least for the years that memory actually began to kick into the inner-workings of my young mind. After all this time though, I have realized how little I truly know about this wonderfully innovative, well-educated and affluent suburban town. On my three-mile walk to Coupa Cafe, for example, I observed many beautiful houses that have been shadowed by the more apparent and salient ones. I felt like I had acquired a new pair of eyes as I peeked throught the bushes and noticed a quirky, hippie-tastic home. In the front yard stood a lone tree, adorned with at least 50 cobalt blue glass bottles as replacements for the leaves the dying tree once carried on its braches. Street art at its finest. On my two-and-a-half mile walk to Douce France, I passed by an adorable old man who looked up and smiled at me while gathering up some tools in his garage full of antiques. I jumped into a sea of gold leaves, breathed in the brisk December air, conducted an uncontrolled social experiment in an effort to observe the type of people who make and avoid eye-contact, and reflected on the philosophies and life values Chris McCandless developed during his quest for an unfiltered experience of the "raw throb of existence" (I was reading Into the Wild at that time - I recomment this to all; Jon Krakauer uses such beautiful and poetic language). Walking simply provides a nice 45 minute break from the entropic quality of quoditien life. It allows us to indulge in a state of solitude and introspection, while inspecting the nuances of our ostensibly familiar surroundings.

Walking also enhances the ability to go on unconvential explorations, redefining the word "lost" into "adventure-time." Little surprises and treasures are ubiquitous and all it takes is some expansion of our senses and a bit of curiosity to stumble upon them. I think one of the reasons I love travelling so much is that it allows for walking to be the primary mode of transport, and consequently cultivates some amazing stories and memories of all kinds in the process.

So moral of the story, I didn't really miss driving that much. And I'm probably still going to always to choose walking over driving whenever I can. It makes arriving at the destination about ten times more satisfying. And now, to end on the most cliched note possible, "Life is a journey, not a destination." You knew this was coming.

P.S.  I hope one of my future posts will be about geocaching. Its high up there on the bucket list. 

the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up

I set an ambitious goal for myself earlier this year to attempt to watch a Ted Talk on a daily basis. A month or so ago, when I actually began to implement this goal, I stumbled upon a 2006 Ted Talk by Sir Ken Robinson, a purportedly internationally-known leader in the development of education and innovation. In his presentation, titled "Schools Kill Creativity," he essentially spends 20 minutes communicating that it is not a mere coincidence that the Industrial Revolution and rise of public education occurred simultaneously, for public education systems came into existence to satiate the needs of an industrialist society. 

Given that I watched this particular presentation in the middle of high-stress, replace-sleep-with-coffee, bring-your-pillow-to-the-library finals season at Berkeley, I was in a rather biased state of mind. Focusing primarily on the title of the talk, I went on to write an admittedly partial rant, dictating my post-Ted-presentation thoughts. Here's an excerpt: 

The Industrial Revolution was a critical juncture in world history - an proponent of mass production, a determinant of rightward shifts in aggregate supply, and an instigator for expansions of our production possibility frontiers. Machinery manufactured machines for a change that lingers as profoundly today as it did in the days of its conception. Every modern device whose body can be broken into pieces evidences its connection to this era that all children are ostensibly educated about in the confined boundaries of their history classrooms.

However, what the eager young minds of tomorrow fail to realize is their History textbooks' failure to shed light on the truth. True, it does seem a bit oxymoronic to attend an educational institute to learn ignorance. Yet, this contradiction can only be broken when the child picks up his pen to extend the timeline of the Industrial Revolution to the bottom of the page, past the pile of pages beneath, onto the wooden desk up until it makes contact with his own skin. In such circumstances, it is incorrect to claim that history repeats itself, for Industrial Revolution never ended. It merely underwent a physical metamorphosis. Now, you are the machine and school is your factory.

 

Yes, quite melodramatic, I know. In retrospect, I'm not even sure where I was going with this. Anyhow, because I had to return to my studying, I ditched this little rant and forgot about it. During break though, I found it in my pool of documents and decided to watch the talk again in my fresh-adequate-amount-of-sleep-relaxed state of mind, to see if I could rationalize my histrionic logic. The second time around, I was gripped by a Picasso quotation that Robinson referenced in his speech: "All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up." 

Post Ted-Talk thoughts, round two: In a world in which much of what we do is reduced to simple numbers and letters, it is easy to lose sight of our talents and abilities. It is easy to get addicted to perfectionism and to allow oneself to believe that anything less than 100 percent is a sign of failure. This ever-increasing mentality exacerbates the "problem" that Picasso indicates in his words of wisdom. In our woes over so-called worthlessness, we disregard the boundless worthiness of our mistakes and their incredible capacity to foster creativity and innovation. And I am most definitely very guilty of allowing myself to consciously get caught up in this problematic chain reaction of self-deprecation. 

I have been wanting to join the world of bloggers for quite some time, and thanks to Picasso, I finally found that much-needed spark of inspiration to catalyze this action. People have been asking me, "Oh what's your blog about?" and I've been struggling to provide a definite answer, because I honestly think this blog is about exploring an abstract, or many abstract, ideas. Its about utilizing both hemispheres of the brain equally. I'm just trying to remember to remain an artist as I grow up.