Earlier this month I texted my long-distance best friend about what I wanted from the month of November. I don’t do this often (i.e., setting goals or ambitious intentions for a given month), but after an exceptionally odd September and October, I thought that it was necessary to enter November with intent.
In short, I mentioned to her that I wanted to answer the question of “What is the relationship between fullness and fulfillment?” For context, my life has been especially full over the past few months. Busy with work, busy with schoolwork, busy with trying to prioritize my friends over all of it—it makes for a lot of stress without a lot of free time. However, in many ways, being this busy has felt good. For one of the first times in my life, I fully enjoy the classes I am taking, my coworkers are fun to be around, and being busy provides a sense of unprecedented productivity. I felt a similar sense of this over the summer (however, not to the extent I feel it now), and I wrote a short note in my phone titled, “I want to be tired.” As to me, being tired is in direct accordance with a rich and fruitful life.
“Burnout” as a concept did not seem realistic to me. I’ve always been one to take tasks as they are given to me with the attitude of “I just have to get this done—there’s really no other way,” and I’ve been successful with this mindset up until this point. I never have late assignments, I always offer to take on the bulk of the work in a group project, and ultimately, everything gets done somehow. I feel like a lot of women in college can relate to this sentiment. Despite this seemingly unwavering, inexplicable strength, I was wrong. The busyness of the past two months did burn me out, causing me to drop one of my classes late in the semester, while another of my classes suffers the weight of two very poor test grades. Even though I’ve been feeling ahead, or at least feeling like I was maintaining pace with everyone around me, I had in fact been falling behind. I haven’t had time to go grocery shopping (other than at 10:00 pm after work), let alone cook meals for myself. I haven’t finished any book recreationally since the end of the summer, which does more harm to my psyche than I would like to admit. I hadn’t had good quality time with my friends, usually going to my friend Maddie’s to nap or just lay down instead of doing anything of substance. Plans with friends was always forced to the side, despite me not wanting it to be this way. I was discontent with my life, with what I had unconsciously let it become. Despite my life being full, I remained unfulfilled, not empty, but withered. A withering soul is not good for an individual.
So as you can now hopefully see, setting an intention for November of figuring out the difference, or relationship, between fullness and true fulfillment in my life was necessary. And despite the month only being halfway over, I feel that I have a good theory:
Fulfillment is only found in the fleeting!
Emily, what a basic, anticlimactic conclusion. Yes, I know, but let me discuss it with you before you judge harshly.
I’ve had this idea for a while about beauty being impermanent, while ugliness comes from something impermanent trying to be permanent. The notion first came to me as I reflected on the idea of humans filling landfills with our trash, being so selfish as to think of single-use plastic as akin to a legacy. Beauty is not found in the unrotting, dystopian human attempts at lasting forever, trying to leave a trace of our feeble lives in the grand scheme of everything. Beauty, instead, is naturally found in the decomposing organic material beneath our feet, the change of seasons refreshing and forgiving each other century after century, the riverbed that is continually changing because of the new and new and new again fresh water that runs over it. “A man cannot stand in the same river twice, for he is not the same man, nor it the same river,” but when one tries to not only step in the same river but further abide in it, artificiality is formed, as he thinks that his will is stronger than that of the natural. He could not be more wrong. Whatever is mortal cannot become immortal—you are made from dust and to dust you will return.
With this in mind, I’ve found that the same idea can be applied to the everyday happenings of our lives. That which is beautiful will inevitably go away, probably sooner rather than later. You might argue that everything will eventually go away, which would be true, but I would refute that the things that are at risk of slipping from our grasp, that we truly have no control of, are the truly beautiful things. Something like schoolwork or money could be argued as illusions—things that we convince ourselves of having real importance because they are so tangible and could be controlled by us immediately. However, when we think of things like relationships between each other, or how much time we have left with the green leaves of now, or a conversation with a stranger, or the passage of time in general, we know that they must come to an end, and that is why they are beautiful and significant in our lives. When was the last time that you thought homework for a given class was more important than a budding, promising friendship you are experiencing in that same class? I would guess probably never. That’s the point I’m trying to make here, hoping that you understand that fulfillment comes from the things that do not last. Fullness, akin to the artificiality that we give to our own lives, is a gross misinterpretation of fulfillment, the beauty and goodness that falls into our lives, happening to us without involving our will.
I find it very interesting, having said this, that I still believe that art—whether it be in the form of painting, or sculpture, or music—is one of the most beautiful things on the Earth. What difference is there between art and garbage when the point I’ve made is that anything artificially permanent, trying to hold onto something that was never really there, is ugly and intrinsically bad? Art, in all its beauty and prestige would refute my point by its very existence. This idea struck me as I was formulating the basis of this article, and I struggled with it for a while. Eventually, I came to what I would believe to be a strong conclusion. Art is not merely the form or matter of itself– it is also a feeling. The idea that some human, somewhere, at some point in humanity’s timeline experienced a feeling so strong and personally profound that they wanted to share it so vividly in hopes that someone else would experience the same feeling is the beauty within art. The version of Caravaggio’s John the Baptist (John in the Wilderness) is not beautiful to me solely because of its lack of light and brooding, young figure in the middle of the image. Instead, it is beautiful to me because I found it as a hopeless 14-year-old who struggled to find meaning in her own life, believing that love would never find her. She found love through the solidarity that Caravaggio afforded her in painting John the Baptist, the artist conveying some emotion unknowing of the fact that it would be felt by a young girl centuries later at an art museum worlds away. The material art, that of which is tangible, is neutral, as it works as a mere vessel to convey the beauty of the artist’s feeling and intent. So, the feeling is still fleeting and beautiful, as the artist passes away and his own feeling is transcribed and translated into thousands of different feelings, reaching the souls of those that ascribe their own interpretation of beauty to the original art. Eventually, too, the painting will be lost and forgotten, retired back into the “family of things,” and the hearts it reached will decay, feeding the rot in the ground. But, now, that feeling that it conveys is alive and well as long as we are, and must be enjoyed because we know that it will not last.
So, please take this article not only as an invitation to go to the Nelson-Atkins with me, but also as a plea that you will know that everything beautiful is mortal. Everything worth knowing intimately within our lives will also be gone within this same lifetime. I spend much of my time each day thinking about friendships that have faded, about people I once knew that passed on in one way or another, about books that I savored while in the process of reading them, about the bananas ripening in my kitchen as I sit here writing this. All of it is what gives my life fulfillment, as it is the beauty of my life. Please come to know what makes your life beautiful as well. Let your soul ripen with the days.