21. How I discovered the art of living
Laughing while living a personal Western and writing about the Marx Brothers
Hello friends,
Recently, I’ve been on a reading adventure with the book The Entanglement: How Art & Philosophy Make Us What We Are by Alva Noë. He writes,
“The basic work [or purpose] of art … is to unveil us to ourselves, and to do so in ways that enable us to change, to reorganize, to become something different. Art is an ecstatic undertaking with an emancipatory goal. Technology enslaves us. Art works to set us free.”
By that definition, I first began to truly understand the art of living in 1992.
21. Adventures in laughter and open land
Most of my friends at Middlebury went abroad for the spring semester of junior year. Because I missed the deadline to apply to Middlebury’s school in Madrid (I was taking Spanish), Josh (my boyfriend who attended UMass-Amherst) and I looked for a domestic university with low out-of-state tuition where we could both get credit. For our spring at the University of Wyoming, we rented an off-campus apartment and I took courses in the History of the U.S. West, American Folklore, and Mexican-American Literature.
Out West there was a vast, dry expanse with 200 fewer years of English colonialist history, and I reveled in the stories of adventurers on mercenary missions and quests for personal freedom far from the shadows of Puritan influence. Spending time in San Francisco and Seattle that summer infected me with a West Coast bug that has defined my life for the last 30 years.
It’s an odd turn to say that I spent that fall writing an undergraduate thesis on the Marx Brothers. Perhaps the reason was simply that I could get away with it. I had just gotten away with living a personal Western, a dream fueled by reading Larry McMurtry novels and watching Westerns in film class at Middlebury. In the fall, Josh would be 150 miles away at UMass, and I wanted to keep our laughter going. My “ecstatic undertaking” was writing a 70-page analysis of comedy.
When have you felt most fully alive, engaged in the art of living?
The call for adventure is a call for change
Whether the adventure has an outward focus (travel, relocation, education) or an inner focus (reading, writing, meditation, making things), there’s a good chance that the undertaking will change us. The semester “abroad” and the thesis topic were the first two major decisions I made purely because I wanted to. That year liberated me from a lot of ideas about how I thought I was meant to live, what I could study, and what true love felt like.
This summer, I’m embarking on yet another adventure: starting a new writing project while looking for a new job. I’m inviting the process of pursuing what I want in the coming months to change me, reorganize me, and help me become something different.
May your activities this week set you free from who you thought you needed to be.
Love,
Lee Ann
