“Sensory overload may require action” (Post 42)

(I included a paragraph from my Journey with Jeddah coffee table book, published in 2019. The last paragraph is new.)

I feel guilty to some degree if I do not process what I had already experienced. Let me explain it like this: I really admire people who can simply travel seemingly endlessly and who are never “plagued” by the need to express their experiences or who do not want to consolidate the input in their heads. I think I will become slightly “crazy” if I were to see the world in a “careless” fashion and I did not have time to process a selection of experiences through painting or writing. That is my dilemma: I need to become still so that the process of “the arts therapies” can tell my mind what I had gone through, however painful or exhilarating the experiences were. They have to be made understandable to myself at least until I feel that I have attempted to re-package the past visual input meaningfully. Obviously, this can lead to a lot of inner turmoil, because time does not always give us these opportunities for artistic reflection. Please forgive me if my words seem very flowery and illogical now, but the bottom line is, I have a “compulsion” to distill the essence of my experiences in order to feel I am functioning fully in the near “future”; this is the “responsibility of privilege” in my case. The positive side of the “responsibility of privilege” is that it saves you money too, because you simply have to find a chair and sit there!

Hopefully, you will not remain stationary; the creative muse may take your hand and lead you to your guitar or easel (for example). I arrived in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and I saw many things which I simply had to portray in art or in writing. The old city in Jeddah is now a UNESCO site and it is a world of wonder which no artist can ignore – if he or she sees it for the first time. Here you will see two very small drawings (15-minute sketches) I made to “acknowledge” what I experienced in the old city. May you find time to express what your heart is telling you to do.