And a Glass of Wine

I've been thinking recently about experiences. If you take a look around you there are things eveyrwhere that reflect one aspect or another of life back to you. The music on your ipod, the series on tv, the book on your bedside table. They're all products of people's experience of life and everything around them, relayed back to you in one form or another.

Artists, musicians, poets, writers, dancers, actors; all of these people, these roles, have one thing in common. That they do precisely this. They observe the world around them, and not only around them but in them. Seeing how life affects us and moulds us, and in doing so becomes part of us. They take part of that life in them and try portray it in a way they find they're able to. A person may play a few notes or write a few lines, but there comes a point where it's not about what's in front of the creator or audience, but what it does to them. What feeling, drive or thought there is behind the action. That's the beauty of the arts; they go beyond themselves and the meagre means they have, to change those on the receiving end. To evoke emotion, thought, life.

There is another side to this picture. Who knows how many beautiful works are out there, unseen and unknown, made by people who have no need to show them to others, or perhaps don't have the opportunity to do so. But still they go on. Still they create, even if they know no one will see it. Still there is this urge to take nothing and make it into something, something that's an extension of ourselves. Looking at life and everything in it prompts us to take a journey into ourselves - how we relate to the world, and how that world reacts when we do. And afer coming out the other end of this journey, with whatever new observation we have, with the slightest hint of an epiphany, what do we do? We share it. Because after all, what use is it being an explorer of life if you don't tell of your discoveries?

Out.