Living is Like Tearing Through a Museum…
“Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book and remembering—because you can’t take it all in at once.” —Audrey Hepburn
I love this quote I found in an Audrey Hepburn biography. I read it many years ago, but thought about it often. It stayed in my heart throughout all the failed Girl, Unemployed drafts. So naturally, the quote just had to be included on one of the opening pages of my novel.
I had visited many museums while living abroad, in the States, and while working in travel, so it was meaningful to me that Hepburn found the connection between our lives and museums.
While seemingly simple, Hepburn’s metaphor of life being like tearing through a museum struck me as brilliant because we are all, in essence, living artifacts who get to choose how to curate our lives on any given day. So, here is a crucial question I want to ask you about yours:
If there were a big museum opening of your life tomorrow, what would it look like?
This question comes with the weight and responsibility of our choices. Asking ourselves this question makes us realize that we must be present, intentional, and purposeful about our lives. Every. Single. Day.
When we're young, we are limited in our life experiences, so we aren't as discriminating when life invites us to participate in all these opportunities: Experience over here! No, experience over here! Pick me! Come here! Experience me, me, me, me!
We naively say yes to experiences without considering the consequences later. Yes to drinking too much. Yes to nightclubs. Yes to toxic friends, jobs, and relationships.
But as we get older, we grow to understand that time is limited and we can only create our best work and lives when we are at our best selves, which means being ruthless with our time and who we’re giving it away to, as well as how and why.
And especially at what cost.
So let’s curate our museums starting yesterday. Let’s be ruthless. Ruthless. RUTHLESS. I love that word, ruthless.
Oooh, that will be the title of another one of our bloggy blog, blog, blogs…
