Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, paintings, or films. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking at all. Maybe because it’s easier that way, easier not to wonder why certain sunsets make our throat tighten, or why an old song can feel like a memory we never knew we’d buried.They’re busy living, or trying to, so they’re not really concerned with Plath’s or Dickinson’s poems, or anybody’s poems. Poetry is for dreamers, a hobby for people with empty calendars. Artists eat dreams for breakfast, but they don’t.
So they stay on the surface, filling the hours with meaningless conversations and repetitive tasks, letting their hearts sink in the familiar numbness that’s been running their lives for far too long.
So no, if you ask them, human creativity doesn't matter, or maybe it does to those who still remember how to feel .
Until, one day, their mom dies, they lose a friend, their home doesn’t feel like home anymore, somebody breaks their heart , they don’t feel loved. Or maybe a once in a lifetime opportunity slips through their fingers, a sudden illness changes their daily life, words they wished they’d said ten years ago cross their minds, the weight of regret heavy on their shoulders. They pile up quietly, and without a sound the surface they once floated on begins to crack, and the fragile safety of numbness begins to give away.
And all of a sudden, they’re desperate to give sense to this pain. Has anybody ever felt this miserable? How did they endure it, survive it, come out the other side?
It is only when the heart is shattered that the word reveals itself anew. They start noticing the colors of the sky again, the way someone’s eyes sparkle when they laugh, the warmth of a kiss against their skin, the texture of the rain in their hair.
Or the opposite. Something great happens. They receive an unexpected call from an old friend, the news that they are going to be parents for the first time, they meet someone and time stops, a love so intense they can barely see straight, they wake up every morning eager to feel the sunlight spill across their body, happiness fills their heart so much it could burst from their chest. Has anybody ever felt so alive before? What is happening inside of them? They wish those feelings would never end.
It’s in those moments, born of despair or hope, that art stops being a luxury out of the heart’s reach and becomes a visceral need, a need deeper than anything, larger than you or me, buried within us since the dawn of humanity.
From the handprints, faded by time, left on the walls of ancient caves to Michelangelo’s frescoes, creation has been, and will always remain, the ultimate proof of human existence, a testament to the depth of the soul.
Art allows us to transform what we feel into something raw, something tangible. It frames the emotion, gives it shape, turning it into something that lives beside us, and not for us. You don’t go looking for it, it finds you.
Every line, every note, every brushstroke becomes a vessel for what we cannot yet say, a compass pointing toward a feeling, waiting to be named, to be felt, entirely.
It might be a single quote from a book you abandoned years ago, waiting on a shelf you’d stopped dusting, a sentence you suddenly understand, as if it had been written for this precise fracture in your life.
Or a painting you passed every morning on your way to work, barely noticing how the characters in the painting had the same sorrow in their eyes, how something in it aches back at you, you don’t know why, you only know it sees you.
Yesterday, last year or centuries ago, someone else has stood where you stand now, what you’re feeling has existed before you, it was never yours alone to feel, passing from one trembling heart to another, carried through time, we were born with this pain built in, through words, colors, and sounds, a fragile legacy, that whispers to us, I was here too.
Art is what we reach for when reality becomes unbearable or unbearably beautiful, how we anchor ourselves to the moment, even when it hurts.
Poetry, beauty, romance, love, this is how we learned to stay alive, what we always turned to, long before we understood survival, and it has been keeping us alive ever since.
Hajar Nassila
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