All too often, students succumb to the unfortunate throes of expectation and stress that come along with attending a competitive high school. By all means, stress can be a positive, powerful force which may catalyze production, but, once it reaches a certain threshold, it overwhelms people to the point of feeling stuck, useless, and incapable of progressing. Brains shut down. Students try to think but thoughts do not form. Of course, this scenario does not play out everyday, nor does every reaction to stress always occur to such an extreme degree. However, stress is a problem faced regularly enough that I’ve sought out a remedy.
Enter mindfulness: a branch of meditation in which the goal is to be aware and focused on the present moment, achieved by focusing on one type of phenomenon, whether that be breaths, leaves ruffling in the wind, or the way Ray LaMontagne carefully lingers on the last words of each phrase in “Be Here Now.” In his song, LaMontagne grapples with the idea of mindfulness by softly urging his listeners to be in the moment. In the opening lyric, LaMontagne gently whispers, “Don’t let your mind get weary and confused,” as if reminding listeners to stop agonizing over the frivolous and superficial, and to “be here now,” to savor the present, to relax, and to take a deep breath. When listening to a song, the music flows into a student’s mind, temporarily blanketing any worries or stressors and empowering the student to focus solely on the music and its message, thus, while providing many gentle music breaks of soft guitar strumming and breezy stringed instruments, LaMontagne allows students the time to experience this focus, and to close their eyes and calm their minds.
I explored the Art Institute a while back, and although some would deem the Art Institute to be more sedating than calming, I’d have to kindly disagree and divert their attention toward Francis Silva’s “Ten-Pound Island, Gloucester,” a hidden gem nooked cozily on the first floor. When I was beyond ready to leave, I stumbled across Silva’s painting and felt compelled to stay and observe, almost unblinkingly, for longer than I’d ever focused on a painting before. Silva’s beach-front sunset almost shimmers with unnaturally realistic color; I see the waves gently crashing onto warm sand, carrying away our worries.
The painting kindly grabs our hands and almost massages our minds, inciting the sort of innate calmness within calamity whirring on ocean shores. Silva’s choice to saturate the majority of his canvas space with ethereal sky adds to that comfort, as the colors hug us with their subtly whimsical pastels, and the glowing sun, delicately settled in the very middle of the painting, thaws our souls with its glowing beams. For those few sacred moments we can experience Silva’s painting, we are infiltrating our minds’ hard drives, unearthing a loophole to stress. We’re transported to the golden shores of Ten-Pound Island, a world in which our worries do not worry us, and, in fact coexist with us. A world in which we can indulge in something fantastically simple and take a vacation from stress.
Mindfulness is incredibly accessible, yet, to it students remain blind, as they allow themselves to remained shackled to due dates and arbitrary numbers. And, when students spend too much time in the future scrambling to find their sanity, they forget their lives in the present and begin wasting away, contorting into the human incarnate of those dates and numbers they long to forget. Dates and numbers should not become dogma. While focusing on something like a painting, you are forced into the present, and with a painting like “Ten-Pound Island,” the present becomes somewhere you’ll want to sit down on a beach towel with a cup of tea and enjoy for a little while. Lamontagne’s song provides an aural technique for students to reduce stress, and Silva’s painting provides a visual means. A fascinating combination of the two may very well become a superpower stress reducer.
The Botanic Gardens waterfall garden seamlessly combines breathtaking plants, trees, and flowers with a cascading waterfall that splashes gracefully over brown-gray stones. If there’s anything out there that epitomizes tranquility and encourages supreme relaxation, the waterfall garden might just reign as champion. A student could sit on top of the garden and take in a myriad of calming phenomena: the sight of crisp, bright perennials and conifers cascading alongside the waterfall, the sound of a calm breeze ebbing through the trees, and even the scent of the fresh, clear air. Nature has a universal power to calm and relax people — feeling at one with nature may translate to feeling at one with yourself – so it only makes sense that the waterfall garden, abounding with naturally captivating stimuli, would help lead students away from stress and towards mindfulness.
We live in a stressful world; a world in which everyone is expected to go go go, to always be alert and productive. We live in a world exploding with stressors, with people bubbling dangerously with unhealthy levels of stress. If we could all take a step back and focus on art and on using that art to relax, calm down, control our stressors, and thus better ourselves, our stressful world will learn take a sigh of relief and appreciate its existence.
