I teach writing workshops and sometimes I start by saying, “We’re alchemists. We can turn hurt into gold. We can dance it, we can sculpt it, we can watercolor it. But in here, we will write it. However, the most important part of the equation is, first we have to feel it. Lots of us skip the pain part. I mean, who wakes up and says, ‘Yippee, I think I’ll hurt today’?”
In an article in the New York Times, David Brooks wrote that studies show college students are fleeing the humanities for the computer sciences. But it’s the humanities that ask the most important question: How should I live my life?
The title of his article was “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society.”
Brooks began his piece by sharing this line he saw inscribed on a tote bag in the gift store at the Museum of Modern Art: “You are no longer the same after experiencing art.”
I couldn’t agree more. I also agree the world is sad, lonely, angry, and mean right now. And I might add, in terrible pain. And the solutions many people are using to alleviate their suffering seem to be making them suffer even more.
After 45 years of facilitating Writing from the Heart workshops, where folks write their personal stories––their own tiny murders they’ve experienced––I have learned most of us got hurt in our young lives. And what many of us did with those tiny murders was to push them down, send them packing, tear them into little pieces, store the pieces, give them a home, and let them marinate in our kidneys, our livers, and our hearts. Depending on how much healing we have done, we may have had the opportunity to turn that pain into something else.
My friend Tanya says our culture is suffering from soul sickness. “Soul” was a word I had never even heard outside the synagogue, until the ’60s happened. Eventually the bestseller list was inundated with books like “Soul Searching” and “Soul Retrieval” and “Care of the Soul” and “The Seat of the Soul” and “The Untethered Soul” and “Chicken Soup for the Soul”––then I started to wonder if I was going to see an ad for Soul Sweaters, made from 100 percent wool from sheep who meditate.
Maybe, in this techno world, our minds are becoming too filled with facts and less filled with feelings. When I hear the statistics about kids with anxiety and depression, I hope somewhere they’re connecting a few of the neon dots to the fact that creative programs are being canceled in the schools. No more music, no more art, and with the short attention span of everyone (including moi) these days, reading has gone the way of the dodo as well.
I just know from the deepest part of me that the arts are the doorway to learning about each other, about the human condition.
I know as a kid, reading was my “in.” Nancy Drew taught me girls could actually think. And “Cherry Ames, Student Nurse” taught me how compassion could heal. And “Catcher in the Rye” gave me permission to . . . well, sound like me. Reading is how I learned that everyone has struggles and everyone has a broken heart and there are ways we can survive and even thrive through darkness, that we can love each other into feeling more whole.
Through books I found maps that directed me to ways past and through the loneliness and the sorrow, and showed me that there was light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, that there might be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, that yes, Virginia, if you were good and kind, there could be anything you yearned for if you yearned badly enough.
In the ’90s I had the extreme privilege of teaching for Robert Coles at Harvard. The class was called Literature for Social Reflection. I remember feeling so out of place on that gorgeous campus. The whole first year I was teaching, I expected someone to clamp a strong arm on my shoulder and say, “What do you think you’re doing here?” The imposter syndrome. I remember telling the kids, “I would never have gotten in here.” I said, “I think I’m heart smart. But don’t ask me about my SAT scores.”
I learned that year that those kids were no different from the kids I had taught at Hartford Community College. They were just as worried and stressed and insecure and sweet and smart and innocent. Maybe even more so, because they had so much at stake. So I think, yes, David Brooks is right. We have become a sad lonely angry mean society.
Science is vitally important. But are we relying too heavily on the left side of our brains? I say bring back the arts and the humanities. And maybe, just maybe, more of us can reconnect to the humanity in ourselves. At least we’d have an outlet for all those unexpressed feelings.
