When I was in my twenties, I used to go to the movies every weekend with a friend of mine. It would be fair to say that he was the one who taught me the real art of watching films, the art of really considering them and learning from them.
In spite of that, he wasn’t precisely a person of the enthusiastic type, and I remember the occasion in which I expressed to him my astonishment and amazement for the recent discovery of such art, more or less with these terms:
-Gee, ain’t that incredible? So much creativity, so much intelligence, so many resources, such a variety of stories and thrills, and all of that for only the price of a ticket… Now isn’t that admirable?
I clearly remember the cold silence that followed. My friend simply didn’t get it. It was too naive for him. That day I discovered for the first time that we regarded human productions in very different ways. To him, everything that reached his senses was something abstract, fallen out of the blue into the screen, the page or the stereo, for his immediate consumption and oblivion. End of the story. For me (naiver, it’s true), while mostly agreeing with him, there was always an additional, underlying evidence: it is another human being, similar to me in many ways, who did this thing. My wonder has no limits. And I call it gratitude.
I have already described in a previous post this “passive” mentality towards objects. It seems to be -sadly, I think- the most usual stance nowadays. Common people do not seem to notice the hand that is behind almost everything one has around; the human kind is self-dependent to the extent that, every morning, in your 5 minutes after waking up, you have taken profit a thousand times of something another fellow human has done. Think about that: the bed you sleep in, the alarm clock manufactured somewhere, with its energy supply, the slippers you purchased from someone, manufactured by someone, now go to the door, that door which etc…
Seeing objects as just “dead” entities leads to a dull, immature and solitary stance. I prefer admiration because it is funnier. And more active: I am not talking of admiration at the foot of the pedestal. As a creative person, I see admiration as part of an active process of discovery: breaking the toy to see how it works, then trying to make a better one. Human beings are imitative by nature, so the more times you remember that this or that was done by a human, the more times you’ll try to mimic it.
I am a deep diver and have had the occasion to admire a lot of things, one at a time, each of them quite intensively: besides movies there is psychology, the Marvel comics mythology, computers, books, writing, guitar, piano, meditation… Very different disciplines, but in all of them, the sequence is always the same:
a) Oh god, how did he do that?
b) What do I need to do it?
Such a variety of interests (when boosted by admiration, not as a 9 to 5 obligation) is also healthier, because of the way in which the brain works. It is more profitable, too, because, by interconnecting several areas of thought, you reinforce all of them, and your ideas will become more original.
In fact, I’ve come to think that admiration is a human need. And thus, when it is not properly respected, it finds other lateral, sick, infamous ways to be satisfied. Admiration is the fuel of human creativity, too: all honest masters should aim to and be comfortable with the idea of training pupils capable to exceed them, capable to make them go wow. In that sense, admiration is a bit “ruthless”: it is like a hunger that can only be calmed down when one explains the mystery, reaches the next level.
And last but not least, admiration is beautiful. Confessing one’s admirations is one of the easiest acts of generosity and makes you feel really good. Tell me who you admire and I’ll tell you who you are. The wisest men I’ve known have always been great admirers, very generous and always willing to see the good aspects in other people’s achievements. The Chinese wise man Confucius, for example, liked to use admiration as a way of teaching; instead of saying “X must be done”, he often talked about this or that guy who had done X, which was admirable. Wise as he was, he understood that a human being is never an isle.
Do you share the “admiration religion”? Who do you admire? How do you do it? What do you get from it?
Related posts:
A reader is not a steamroller
Advanced brain-fu
How to become optimistic with very little effort
Nacho and the primal forces
The magic of journaling