As someone who could maybe win an award called “least religious person on the planet”, it is mostly true that I don’t typically see anything as a sign. However, over the past month and a half, one persistent theme has been recurring in my life.
Before I elaborate, I want to acknowledge the fervent energy of Spring Quarter, which directly relates to my thematic revelations. Anyone at UCSB during the spring will understand what I mean.
The sun is out; most people do not pile classes onto their schedules the way they do in winter, and summer feels like it’s one blink away. This has caused at least some of my friends and me to feel like we need to do everything.
People are planning trips, parties, and truly any kind of social event. With the justification of “needing to say yes to everything because we are almost done with school”, every plan turned down can feel like a missed opportunity.
Now to reveal my received message: slow your roll!
By no means is this groundbreaking. I also don’t mean “do less”; I just mean I’ve realized I need to recalibrate how I think about my life.
Despite engaging in a lot of social activity, when I try to isolate the moments I have enjoyed most, the majority have been quite plain.
The highlights so far have been walking to IV Market every evening with my roommates, sitting on our disgusting couch and airplaying our photos, videos, and texts onto the TV, or shuffling around together to get coffee.
Although I stare in amazement at the horrifying photos we all take after a night out, the best and funniest to me are my pictures of random things.
My favorites are my roommates sleeping in the middle of the day (I’m aware it’s creepy to photograph that), us sitting on the floor of our living room, and other things not notable to outsiders.
Nagyapa’s Phone
The moment I recognized my enjoyment of the mundane was after looking through my Nagyapa’s (grandpa in Hungarian) camera roll. As a Christmas present for our whole family, my Uncle Steve digitized our thousands of family photos and uploaded them to a drive.
He also downloaded all the photos from Nagyapa’s iPhone, who, for reference, passed away last June. His photos were left untouched, in the order in which he took them, and go back over ten years.
Although it might not seem so, the camera roll of an 80-year-old man is honestly wonderful. My Nagyapa was an extremely smart, thoughtful man, with a love for science, art, sports, and other people.
Hidden among the hundreds of accidental screenshots of his lock screen, or perhaps photos of his feet in his compression socks, were pictures that exemplified what he loved in life.
Many were photos taken from my grandparents’ backyard in Mission Viejo, looking out to the mountains. He took photos of his beloved plumeria flowers or of geologic formations that interested him.
He also took many candid photos of Jan, my nana, doing her everyday activities, such as playing Candy Crush on her iPad or golfing. I love the photos he took of her so much because, although simple or blurry, they reflect the love in his life.
I feel similarly about my own photos of my friends because, although they’re also poor in quality due to my confusingly dirty phone camera (it is always telling me to clean the lens, and I can’t fix it, so please help if you know anything), they convey an identical sweet feeling.
Until a few weeks ago, I had never opened up the drive to his camera roll. After spending hours scrolling through his photos, I felt a growing sense of love and appreciation for what surrounds me, whether exciting or mundane.
Flores de cardo
The next “message” that I have felt came to me unexpectedly in class. In one of my major classes, “Posmodernismo” (I heavily recommend it), we spent a week discussing a Chilean poet named Pedro Prado.
Prado’s first book of poetry was titled “Flores de cardo,” which means “thistle flower.” He held a strong interest in the material world, as opposed to an idealized, transcendental version common among modernist poets of the earlier 20th century.
A quick note on Hispanic modernism– it favored beautiful things, with flowers such as roses and lilies symbolizing a divine beauty. Something like thistle, on the other hand, is meant to represent, at least in the case of Prado, beauty in humility.
The idea of something ugly and boring like a thistle being celebrated for its plainness excited me. Once again, I began to think about what pleases me most in my own life. I thought of Nagyapa’s photos, and then my own, and all of the small things that excite me.
I feel kind of funny saying all this because I like to compulsively post things on Instagram, many of them curated, with details planned down to the emoji (usually non-humble ones like the lollipop or the poodle).
Nevertheless, I believe that you can still say yes to all of your social plans and events, and all the flashy and exciting parts of your life. I have just learned that in an era when everything moves so fast, it’s very grounding to remember to love all the small things.
Maya
One last moment that makes me smile, of course, involves my roommates once again. The three of us were hungover and had made our pilgrimage from the Outpost coffee shop to the nearby park, where there are sometimes lots of stands with clubs or people handing out free things.
Maya, my roommate, had a matcha and an apple fritter in one hand, and by the time we were leaving the park, she had a piece of free pizza and yerba mate in the other hand. She stood there attempting to balance it all, and stacked her apple fritter on top of her matcha cup.
Knowing her well as someone who deeply appreciates small moments, I thought she was going to take out her phone and take a picture of her fritter-matcha stack. She did just this.
I, of course, found this very endearing. For me, this summed up everything I had been thinking and feeling. Amid a hectic month of plans and parties, I was so happy to be surrounded by people sharing the joy of being together and doing unexciting things.
What makes me happy is knowing that, whether my life is fast-paced or not, I can always find joy by remembering that this happiness comes from appreciating life’s slow moments.