hello there

“has anyone seen em all?” asked the small boy

a smile cracked the stoic face of the stoic jedi who couldn’t help but remember what he was like as a nine-year-old boy growing up in the jedi temple on coruscant.

Ever since I was in my first year of college, I had the ever growing fascination with anthropology. Why do humans do the things humans do? Why have such traditions like art, language and pastimes been passed down from generation to generation?

Art to me is what I feel like we are all here to do. Create. Whether that be on paper, on canvas, on the silver screen, on camera, into a microphone, with your hands, with your imagination or these days with the simple input into an AI generator. My belief is that we as human beings are here to create our interpretation of how we see the world and leave it in a better place when it’s our time to ascend to the Heaven above. In this world, everything is art. Building a bridge, kicking a football, telling a story. All are art forms that we often take for granted but the next time you walk down the street and notice the rows of trees that are systematically placed in the middle of a pitch of grass along the sidewalk, remember that is as much of a form of art as is the painted mural on the side of the building across the way.

Language has always baffled and bewildered me because of how such a simple thing like a cup of water to you is immediately taza de agua to someone else who speaks Spanish. Yet if you were to ask “Would you like a cup of water?” They may not understand; But if you signaled a shaka in a drinking motion while asking they may respond to it. Because of such universal context clues we as humans are able to communicate with one another despite being raised in different languages. I believe that knowing, comprehending and understanding different languages is one of the most valuable currencies we as human beings can obtain. Not only can you communicate directly with your own culture, but also those of a different culture altogether and that unlocks the ability to learn more ways of life, traditions and aspects of living previously unable to be learned.

Pastimes truly are brilliant because at their core they are simply games. In America, our greatest pastime is holistically baseball. In England, they have football. But what has prompted the world to keep these steadfast traditions alive and what others have fell to the wayside? Remember back as little kids being in the neighborhood and riding bikes with your friends. What games did you love playing? For me it was always wiffleball, basketball, football, flyer’s up, and kick the can. I wasn’t a big fan of doing squirt gun fights or nerf wars because the neighbor kid across the street would always cry and cheat if things weren’t going his way, his mom even would come out a berate us which gives me second hand embarrassment to this day. But I feel like it’s things like that where games and pastimes may not make it out or to the next generation respectively. If 7 of us loved playing basketball, and only 3 of us enjoyed squirt gun fights then which activity has the greater odds of each getting passed onto the next generation?

It’s the simple things in life we tend to forget or take for granted that make us the way that we are. Through art, language and pastimes I love being a human being and look forward to taking this newfound perspective into the next few weeks in my own life.

love trev