"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." - Pablo Picasso

Not only music but any kind of art such as writing novels or photography is a way for people to express their ideas and emotions. Everyone has their own ways of expressing themselves. I, as a piano player who is not so good at putting my feelings into words, I appreciate the way I can play the piano depending on my mood at the time and what is going on in my life. When I am not having a good day, I obviously do not choose to play waltz or something up tempo.

DJ shadow says in the beginning of the song building steam with a grain of salt how he is a student of the drums but at the same time he is a teacher of the drum too. In the process of practicing the piano, I teach myself and learn from it also. This is why I prefer not taking piano lessons from someone anymore. Except learning the skills, how can someone tell me how I should play the piece? I am sure there are some intentions that the composer wanted to tell us but the way we play is totally up to us. I believe there is no right way of doing anything in art because everyone has different perceptions of beauty. Therefore I also think that anyone who loves art is or can be an artist.

I once had a conversation with a mother whose daughter loves painting so much that she does not do anything but paint.  From mother’s viewpoint, she wants her daughter to study hard not only to paint because there are only a few people in the world who can make money by pursuing art. So I asked her if she can give me any evidence that shows me her daughter cannot be like Picasso. She could not answer. What she was doing was building up a wall of convictions without any concrete evidence against her. While she has this wall within herself, it is not possible to truly appreciate the art.

Realization

I found the moment on the second day when Phil starts realizing something is wrong very interesting. I think realization is the catalyst which motives us to create change in our life. Before getting out of our own cave, one has to know that they are in the cave. Of course, the path escaping from the cave is difficult. But if there was no realization, nothing is going to change. There is no end if there is no start. In comparison to my experience where I was trapped in my own false sense of reality and did not know the truth about my friend, Phil’s first realization was a bit easier to see, since he was experiencing the exact same events every day and it was not something that should be real.

Even though Phil recognized what was wrong with him, he struggled for a while until he realized that being self-centered was not going to help him in any way. There was another realization there. I liked when he finally understood that he had to be the one to make a change instead of trying to change the people around him. As I wrote in my last blog, it had to be that realized what I was seeing was not the truth, not being told by someone else, but self-discovery. It takes time to find out and accept the facts that what we experience and see they are not necessary always right. We need to take the reality and start trying to change, because in the end there is always a path leading out from ones own cave.

We don't know that we don't know.

To know the truth, one has to be willing to know the truth. However, we often don’t even know that we don’t know the truth. It is very easy to become stuck in our own cave, like that of Plato, and not to see the world around us. How can we find the real truth when we already think what we know now is the truth? We must at some point come to terms with the fact that what we think we know might not actually be the truth. One must realize, and accept that fact.

There was this one particular girl in my high school that I just could not get along with for a very long time. She was also Japanese like me, but much more physically attractive and smarter than I was. Regardless, even with her attractive appearance and the number of friends she had, there were some people who did not like to be around her. Those were the people who happened to be my friends. High school was all about who we did or didn’t like. The more I heard rumors about her from those people, the more I disliked her. Once someone had told me she that said she didn’t like me either. Now I was my own slave who did not know the truth but only rumors about her bad reputations from other people. To my shame, those rumors became the truth in my mind and I felt like I knew all about her.


However, I started wondering if she was actually the evil person that my friends described to me. Rather, it was my ego that wanted her to be the evil person that I built up in my mind. I was the vicious one who was so envious of everything she had; her skinny long legs, big cute smile, and good friends whom adored her all. All the things I thought I knew about her were in actuality only what I wanted to believe to be true.


If I wanted to know the truth about her, I had to get rid of all the insecurities, shadows, I had. I feared knowing the real truth and the possibility that I could ruin relationships I had with my friends if I found out the truth. I had to do it, and risk of losing my friends. The truth was what I was looking for, not my friends’ reputations. Life is about taking risks and having the courage to do so, and standing up for one’s personal moral code. There are some things one cannot gain without taking risks. Sometimes someone gives us an opportunity to see an entirely new world, one which we never had imagined.


Eventually I spoke to her. We began to know and learn about each other little by little. I cannot describe how embarrassed I felt when I found out something I thought it was true, actually wasn’t. As I expected, there were some friends who did not like that I became friends with her. They just didn’t realize that what they thought to be the truth actually wasn’t. They in a sense will be stuck in their own cave until they realize it. I did not even bother trying to tell them the truth. I knew that they had to want to find out the truth on their own.