On an early Spring day I met a friend at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We specifically wanted to wander the museum in the morning hours. With so few people in this vast group of structures, at 10AM the MET is a tranquil place. While attending Pratt I visited the museum with great regularity, but not recently. Although it'd been almost a year since I had last visited, for the first time from the moment I approached the MET's beautiful front plaza on Fifth Avenue, the museum felt very familiar to me.
Acting on impulse I decided to try something new: I didn't take a map with me through the museum.
It was a very freeing experience. I found that even if I didn't recognize where I was while in one of the smaller rooms or passageways, I was always no more than a room away from immediately regaining my internal compass. The exciting part about walking through the museum in this way was that, because I always felt comfortable with where I was, it allowed me to really enjoy all of the amazing visuals the MET has to offer. Everything inside the museum is part of its charm. It's a masterpiece in Gesamtkunstwerk. That's a great term taught to me by Mrs. Iacovone, my high school art mentor. Gesamtkunstwerk is a theory of artistic creation in which, the total sum of our surroundings is tied into the overall creative expression. The MET itself is art. Soaking all of that in was incredibly rich. It also dawned on me, hey, that's growth! This internal compass we have works for life too. Even when we think we're lost, we're almost always one move away from regaining our footing. All we need is a little patience and consciousness.
Photos from this set are available for purchase here: thewallbreakers.pixieset.com
