Confronting the world through the lens of one’s perception, while assessing its scarcity and abundance, prompts a reaction, which can range from passion or apathy.
If passion is the inner response then it positions oneself in the flow of things as a quest for a personal path. In the search for a way to place an imprint, however small, in the vastness of the what is, the pendulum swings between turmoil and solace. The belief in change has manifested and there is place for the individual to act upon it. A most paralyzing question is how to go about it, as it lacks the luxury to be left unanswered. So begins a sequence of fits and starts, flights and falls, toward a direction, despite our lack of navigational skills in a world yet to be understood. Life is a testing ground. Challenges arise time and again. As this process takes place, one’s identity progressively acquires well staked out contours. Enough life has been lived to draw a sustained distinction within oneself between notions of good and bad. At that point the problem of self-knowledge has reached a temporary internal equilibrium and a clear picture of one’s movement in the entanglement of life commitments emerges. When the resolve to stay the course is unstoppable, managing the to-do-list in a way that fails to disable those long-term ambitions is a default mode of operation. In the juggling of practicality and dream, the search is for a way to balance an ongoing conundrum: how to reconcile forces- large and small- derailing the desired destination in a measurable action plan. The response might be in one’s investment in merging the call for a social cause into sustained contribution through Art, that is reaching deep into the core of the self to bring out creativity. The individual’s intuition could point to architecture as a catalyst for that, because it did inspire us more than once in the highs and lows of our lives. Being in resonance with our environment, an awareness has progressively arisen about the magnitude in qualitative differences. The mind and the heart have, at last, a common aim.
Readiness to share, to battle, to articulate, to perorate, to evoke, to convince, to woo is the grand inner mechanism to make progress, albeit a non-linear one, in the large scheme of things. It sets in motion our resources to generate work that connects our destinies in the horizon of history, that lineage that goes back as far as memory can reconstruct and will continue to write itself until life goes on. It is an exhilarating realization- an empowering one, and feeling at the center of a symbolic machine inclusive of the self is an effective reality. It is one’s own version of “awakening”.