From this week’s reading, I’d like to respond to Artful Design Principle 8.22, Chapter 8, which proposes:
Design is born of life, incorporates it, and is inseparable from it. Design is all around us, with all the joy and sorrow, dirt, grime, beauty, and imperfections of life.
This week was one of my worst weeks at Stanford, from a breakup to anxiety to ******* to insomnia to a near car accident to the emergency room. It was overwhelming to be sad, the way it is overwhelming to be happy. I felt the weight of the world in my backpack and a thousand squirming butterflies in my stomach.
I was struck by what seemed like an empty expanse of life, a gentle indifference, the same force that pushes the waves to roar over the sand, the wind to blow through the autumn leaves.
And yet under my hands, I nurtured my basil plant back to life. I folded origami from napkins. I kissed the night away under the song “Eternal Sunshine” by Lou Val, who sings of love as “eternal and peaceful / when it’s real.” Love — I held in my hands, nursed from the dead — “put me in a cemetery, kinda scary.”
It reminded me of a passage I wrote for a short story months ago:
Between the leaves, I ran my fingers through the ripples like I would run them through your hair in the shower. The gritty seafoam webbed between my joints, the lingering scent much fishier than the suds from your shampoo.
Whenever I washed your hair, you’d crane your neck under the shower head, dark curly hair hooking away from the heat…
My siren song was your laugh. When I was selfish, I wanted to be the only one who hears it. When I was generous, I wished the whole ocean could carry it across. I wanted to be generous. I tried to convince the ocean I was.
At the time, I felt an overwhelming love; now, I feel an overwhelming sadness. I feel grief like I’m eating oranges at a funeral. I feel the dirty dust clouding my vision, the grime seeping into my diaphragm, the beauty of cotton candy clouds of dawn, the imperfect delirium that falls through my fingertips like rainwater on the roof.
To design is to find beauty & meaning from the mundane, the messy, the painful. I feel life’s design in its chaos and in its simplicity — my quiet moments of contemplation feeling like living a thousand lives, my laugh blurring into sobs, my brain crinkling like plastic under the hot summer sun.
Tomorrow, when I see the ocean, I will wash my own hair now, crying. Half happy. Half salt.
