Small Frames

In June I had the pleasure of meeting a smell-the-roses type of human, which is more rare than you might think. 

“Smell the roses” is a hackneyed phrase that my highschool English teacher strongly discouraged, but I’ve found that we, as a collective, hear those words more frequently than we actually think about or implement them. Smell-the-roses people are an endangered group. Slowly, their phones and laptops and work and stress and relationships and impatience dilute their sense of joy. One day they wake up and no longer feel the sun’s warmth on their skin – they have joined the population I refer to as Distracted Human Beings. Everyone, in some capacity or another, is a member of this group. Unhappiness, unconsciousness, and anxiety are symptoms of existing here; it’s a sickness of sorts that has infected our work hard, play hard country. Eckhart Tolle refers to it as a pandemic. Deepak Chopra calls it the disease of unconscious thought patterns. For Jesus, it is the depraved world. 

Truthfully, it doesn’t matter what it’s called because we observe it every day, in others and in ourselves. I often think back to Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopian work of fiction in which the entire country is addicted to sex and soma, a drug that pacifies thought. The characters go to their assigned jobs each morning, and when they’re not ants in the machine, they have grandiose orgies and overdose on drugs. 

How different are we now? Huxley situates the reality we are living every day within a seemingly bizarre environment. The government overbears. The people lose all agency. Mass destruction ensues. Resolution is irrelevant; hope is extinguished. Is this not the condition of our world today?

I get it though. It’s hard. These observations are about myself as well. It’s so comfortable to comply, to be placated by the roles we prescribe ourselves. When something becomes a constant in your daily intercourse, it’s difficult to reach outside of it. Take anxiety for example. While I am a well-traveled passenger on the depression train, lately my body has been full of bees. It’s a palpable, physical anxiety that hums in my chest when the sun goes down. I haven’t been able to escape my own head in weeks, which is long enough to settle into a sort of comfort with my body-bees. Though the anxiety is unpleasant, it’s become routine. 

It hurts my heart to think that this is the state of the world. We are voluntarily uncomfortable with our minds, bodies, jobs, relationships, etc, because we can’t imagine an alternative. We resist positive change because discomfort is far more familiar; we perpetuate this cycle of unhappiness while telling ourselves, “that’s just life.” 

Personally, I don’t think the word “just” should ever precede life in all of its multitudes. 

Anyway. Back to where this all began, with the smell-the-roses man. He is intelligent and beautiful and his name is Elijah and he doesn’t have it all figured out either, but he takes the time to see the art in the world. 

At first, I only knew this because I followed him on instagram for four long years before I met him. He posted catalogs of artful moments, small things like reflections in windows and the bugs that street lights collect. Though I was experiencing these moments secondhand and through a screen, there was something genuine about the pictures he shared. I wanted to meet this person who took time out of his day to appreciate the beauty in the mundane. I am invariably drawn to smell-the-roses people. While Destination Irrelevant is a new concept to me, I yearn to understand and embody it. How liberating would it be to live for the moment rather than the end? To enjoy presence without wondering what’s next?

Our first evening together was in an underground bar called the Cave. We were sitting side-by-side sipping IPAs when I approached the topic of his chaotically curated instagram feed. I’ll pat myself on the back here because I went about it so slyly. I asked, “If you were going to take a small-frame photo of something behind the bar, what would it be?”

He was quiet for a minute as he scanned the contents of the back bar, every inch of which was riddled with paper clippings, caricatures, grade school block letters, and a bunch of other aesthetic junk. Eventually he settled on the rack of downturned glasses, which refracted the multi-colored cave lights in every direction. I loved that the frame he chose was something ordinary; there are always glasses behind a bar. However, most people only see glasses, they don’t notice the spectacle of reflections, and they definitely don’t consider them art. 

As for me, I chose a sign that was crookedly lettered “Pussy Is Power.” It sat in a pool of purple lamplight beside a rack filled exclusively with Fritos snack bags. 

There’s so much to write about my smell-the-roses man, but I am going to fast-forward to the day he left Chapel Hill because that’s when the album was born. The idea came from the accumulation of photos we had shared back and forth of extraordinary, mundane things like clocks and countertops and ceilings. I referred to these pictures as Small Frames, and created a shared photo album so that we could continue the bit after he moved. 

Six hours apart, we cataloged our days by the beauty that existed within them. 

After a month or so of doing this, however, I noticed that the way I interacted with the world had changed. I slowed down. I stopped for funny road signs and dew-droplets on plants. I was excited to share those moments with someone who appreciated them as much as I did. It seemed that art was suddenly everywhere. 

In reality, there wasn’t any more or less art in the world, I had just become present enough to notice it. I was able to reclaim the childlike wonder that I’ve searched so long for by restructuring the way I processed the external world. Rather than perceiving my surroundings through a filter of lack or anxiety, the reality I had chosen to see was beautiful! My walks to work shifted from exhausting to exciting, and I found that even my human interactions had improved tenfold. One night, halfway through a conversation with one of my bar regulars, I realized that I wasn’t putting on the active listening show, I was actually actively listening. 

Be warned: genuinely caring about others is a side effect of living artfully. 

Without knowing it, Elijah had given me the biggest gift. I cared about something that transcended self. I felt like a kid again, excited over cloud shapes and river rocks! 

In the words of Aldous Huxley, “The secret to genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age.” Though I’m not a philosopher, I think ol’ Huxley was on to something here. I’m convinced this is how we were intended to live. But if so, how do we push past the distraction of daily life enough to reclaim our joy? 

I suppose we start small. 

Today I woke up full of body-bees, but I had the choice to experience this day through an anxious filter or an artful one. Though I can’t always quiet the negative energy within me, I can remind myself that it’s miniscule beside the masterpiece that is life. It’s easier than you think to experience the world with a renewed sense of awe. And if you believe your everyday is art, the dark parts start to become more bearable. Soon you see the beauty in the bees. 

With love, 

Siena ❤