Summer is ending, and my schedule is filling up very quickly. For years, it has been a challenge to find inspiration and motivation. With school, work, family, and life, making time for one’s creative calling becomes difficult. With that, it makes it almost impossible to get into any hobbies.

As a kid, I was a big movie person. I loved going to the cinema the most, although there is an unspoken excellence that comes with viewing a movie in a hotel or on vacation. People would ask, “Well, what did you think of the movie?” and I would light up and start overexplaining every little detail about the experience. Then, I suppose things changed. Fast-forward to now, where I can barely make time to put on an episode of something just for a quick moment of entertainment.

Anytime family or friends would offer to go to the cinema, I would quickly find excuses or simply state that I did not want to go. I lost my love for movies and could not bear to sit for hours watching what I felt were meaningless images flashing by. Even films that piqued my curiosity, I had no interest in seeing.

After years of this, my view suddenly changed, essentially overnight. I was in the kitchen making myself dinner while my brother and sister were in the living room watching a musical. When I heard the familiar sound of “For Forever,” I realized they were watching Dear Evan Hansen. I couldn’t help but glance in the living room and peek at scenes I remembered from the Broadway musical. I hummed to myself when my favorite songs played, and before I knew it, I was sitting down watching along. My noodles had finished cooking minutes ago, yet I stayed there in the living room, watching a movie with my siblings.

After finishing the movie, I felt like my old self again, if just for a moment. I wanted to discuss my opinions on the audio quality, what they added, and what they left out. I wanted to know what my siblings thought of the story and how it made them feel. What was their favorite song? Most importantly, I wanted to see another movie.

A childhood favorite of mine was the movie, August Rush. I have the DVD and used to watch that movie more than I’d ever have time for now. When I thought of films I wanted to watch, August Rush was the first thing that came to mind. I quickly popped in the DVD.

After weeks of revisiting the musicals I loved as a kid, it was time to try something new. I watched movies I had been meaning to watch but never got around to. Even the movies I didn’t love, I appreciated and saw the meaning in them. I was constantly being inspired, let down, entertained, and challenged.

I remembered that watching a movie is not an idle task. It is an experience. It provokes thoughts and emotions, at least it’s supposed to. For a long time, I forgot why I enjoyed movies so much. When watching a film, I was not just a lowly passenger being dragged along a meaningless plot. I was a spectator in the driver’s seat navigating through a story that people banded together to create.

The same sentiment can be applied to music. After years of walking through a creative desert, I found joy in making songs just for the sake of it. I hated how little I felt for the songs I created. It was only when I was able to feel for fictional characters again that I realized a song doesn’t have to have some universal meaning to be enjoyed.

There are many rules to movies and music, and it is easy to get caught up in the technicalities of it all. When I think about it, I spent way too much time wondering what made one work good and another bad. However, art goes beyond such dualities. At the end of the day, someone put a piece of themselves into what was created. Really, all it takes is a little bit of care to find what is truly meaningful.