Feeling weighed down by anything these days? Carrying around any burdens, like a pack mule on some trail? Or maybe you’re one of the lucky ones, practically floating through your days feeling free, like a moth; or soaring hawk-like, with a mighty wingspan, confident in your ability to make a dive, a capture, when you’re ready.
Probably you’re somewhere in between.
When you’re in winter with no let-up, it makes a whole lot of sense to head to a museum, a place offering beauty and all sorts of ways to help you see your own life in a new light. I did just that the other evening, finally (had intended this trip long ago) taking the 15 year-old girl I mentor — and her younger sister — to the Currier in Manchester.
Here they are, standing in the room where there’s a special exhibit on now — called “Hauling.” It was conceived by the artist Ethan Murrow, and actually completed with the help of a bunch of local people, and about 900 Sharpie pens. Essentially, it’s a kind of tribute to the history of work and specifically common tools through the ages, particularly right in Manchester, a city with a strong industrial past. When you look at the scene drawn on the longest wall, you see what appear to be individuals who live right now, in regular clothes, pulling a round, enormous conglomeration of stuff — items that you can hardly distinguish except to know that each one has had a particular use. The mass looks almost like the result of some archaeological dig.
If you go to this site, you can read more about it and see a short video with the artist describing the project.
In the middle of the room, there’s what they call a “kinetic sculpture” — it moves at certain times — with a long piece of fabric on the edges of which have been written, again with black Sharpies, a series of “ing” verbs, like this:
As you gaze at the words, such a wide variety of activities, you might be tempted to attach a kind of thumbs up/thumbs down value to each one; some are clearly onerous or downright nasty, like “lying.” Others, like “hypothesizing,” depict much more positive uses of our bodies or minds. But then you just take in the scope of them, the sheer range of things humans can do with their time, for good or for ill, and you feel amazed, almost as if the stream of words alone can put you in the presence of Leonardo Da Vinci.
For me, visiting this exhibit came at a perfect time. I’ve definitely been hauling stuff around — high school assignments to be graded, specifically. And now, step-by-step, I’m being released from them. The sack I’ve been pulling has been getting lighter by the day, and I’m now feeling almost dizzy with a new feeling of liberation. But then, at the same time, there’s another feeling: not missing the papers, but missing – or anticipating missing– the teenagers, each one an individual, who turned them in. Thus do I feel right in the heart of life. We haul; we sometimes grow weary of hauling. We crave the feeling of not hauling; then, sometimes anxious about being too unattached, too out of step with the rest of humanity, we try to achieve a new way of hauling that helps us be our best selves. We may need to invent new tools to help us do just the kind of work we most want to do, or the work the society most needs, or if we’re lucky—both.
Years after we’re gone, people will know about us mostly through the stuff that we leave behind. And it better not all be plastic, either. All of this heightens my awareness that if I’m really going to finish the draft of the book I’ve been carrying around for a while now — maybe a whole other way to imagine it is just percolating — the thing better become at least an item worth finding.