Poetry in Daily Life

In the society where I grew up, there was an unspoken rule: once you become an adult, playtime is over and the things that bring you joy belong only to your free time. So you wait for the weekend, because during the week you are exhausted from long hours in a job you do not care about. Then you wait for vacations, but that is fifty weeks of suffering for one or two weeks of peace. Eventually you can’t risk doing any changes in your job because you’re waiting for retirement.

The environment mirrors the same split: close by, the grey city offers only work and stress; far away, on some unreachable beach, there is freedom and relaxation. I have had this same conversation with neighbors in cities all over the world.

I believe this is an old paradigm. Younger generations no longer think exactly like that, but the anxiety about the future remains. Coming from an underdeveloped country, I learned early to stretch time across multiple jobs, knowing a retirement pension will never come. Waiting for “the free time” to start living was never an option.

A whimsical, stylized painting by Animalitoland titled "Memorias de las vías." Two rosy-cheeked, animal-like characters ride a small wooden cart on a train track. The character in front, wearing a deep purple outfit with a hood and ears, sits on the cart, holding a flag. Behind them, a smaller character in a similar outfit pushes the cart. The scene is set on a series of merging train tracks, under a large, arched structure, with a blue, dreamlike atmosphere. A shadowy, ghost-like figure of a dog is visible in the foreground to the left.
“Memorias de las vías” (2016) • Acrylic & Spray on Wood • 2×3 m.• Fundación Ferrocarriles Españoles

So the most radical thing to do in that system, is finding a job that gives you some degree of satisfaction (since you’re in for life). Although that might seem scary or unreachable. Many people think I can’t understand them because as an artist, I’ve been blessed with some sort of magical life. When I share the complexity of turning what you love into your work, I get hit by this raw fact: many people have no idea what gives them joy.

So I go back to something more urgent that is never too late to try: the daily acknowledgement of small things, and your response to them. Where can joy start? I play my way around it: I like seeing random people as fantastic creatures, their actions as rituals from another world, imagine the entire backstory of something that caught my attention, look at unusual points of view when walking, put on my headphones and let the music choreograph everything I see. Sometimes I get so inspired I feel the entire street is an installation.

This is why I love cities. They are full of unexpected theater in the most ordinary places: on the way to work, in a supermarket aisle, outside a school. By paying attention, I find remarkable actors and scenes everywhere. You do not need to wait for the cinema to experience a good story, or for that distant beach to feel alive. There is free, ongoing poetry unfolding around us all the time, if we choose to participate.