Experience huddle around one simple, yet, rich and laudable word: knowledge. You will equally agree with me in stating what a mere truth is that knowledge is valuable. This therefore, takes us back to Plato’s Meno in addressing: “what is it about knowledge (if anything) that makes it more valuable than mere true belief?” However, others believe it is not that knowledge is highly important but our understanding of it. Consequently, one shall rephrase the definition to state: Experience is one’s understanding of knowledge.

Somerset Maugham taught us in Theatre that it is in acting and in theatre to be precise one is able to receive more training in experiencing with different characters than anywhere else. A theatre gathers and joins respectfully and exemplary variety of types of humans. Few have paid to appreciate the production put forth, others enter to gain knowledge and the majority approaches the theatre for pleasure. Many on the other hand, go for the sake to announce they have entered a theatre thinking they belong to an elite class.

Hence, theatre is a definition of life. “All the world’s a stage” Shakespeare shared in the Scottish play. “The stage is make-believe” Maugham would add. We all require playing different parts and characters in our life. Whether we are conscious of it or not, in duration of a day we all act unlimited characters that may very well be noble or rugged but anything that would suit our moment’s need would be attained. This is not a fault or a wrong act to engage in, since our motto in life is to go forward, just like a sparkling tide of river, dealing with the flow ahead.

Within each character we master, we graduate from an imperative educational level. For this will trot and transfer our experience to a particular silent power, that will shine when needed in whatsoever errands facing us, to place all in their position. It will also enable us to change roles and be that master and star once again. That is the accomplishment in its fullest: the ability to smoothly shift roles without anyone’s notice, for experience Oscar Wilde shared “is a question of instinct about life”.

Experience, is to grasp from life with an eagle’s eye, the marrow of existence. As Maugham in A Summing Up informed how we have one life, we “should like to get the most we could out of it” and then “death would in the end round off in complete fulfillment”. But, that does not mean to always look ahead for the future and forget the present. Seeing that Max Beerbohm believed: “A very young man is not content to be very young, nor even a young man to be young: he wants to share the dignity of his eldest”.

We need to live each day to the fullest for this day will not be repeated again nor would we be given a second chance to go back and change it. If you are young, then be advised to own your youth and act to the best of your ability, limit and joy. For that future you swim for, will soon be your past. That “passing moment (Maugham communicated) is all we can be sure of…the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now”.

What about the past, you may wonder. Confucius believed one must “study the past in order to divine the future”. Study, that’s all. We should not assemble around it for long, for if we do, it will convey to mean, we have no future.

Therefore, set free our soul to experience each day’s theatre to gain that day’s experience. It requires energy and time to devote to an idea or a theory. But most importantly it necessitates patience and dedication to the subject. Devotion is loyalty camouflaged in patience. Persistence of rehearse performances. For one can measure a person’s life with the amount of experience they treasure.

I would like to leave us all with Oscar Wilde’s thought on experience in Lady Windermere’s Fan “Experience (he began) is the name everyone gives to their mistakes”. Do you agree? For I do not see myself complying completely to endorse this particular reflection!

Summer enjoys promises of outgoing, social, and most importantly a life of potential. Forces or pushes each one of us, not deliberately, but in a manner so smoothly as its soft warm air and so elegantly as a lady’s fan gesture.

Summer provides ensemble of creativity. You and I, same as Van Gogh have dreams of our world of caprice. But are we like him when he communicated: “I dream my paintings, and then I paint my dreams”? I would like to believe that we all are, and when we wake up in the morning shine of summer we own that will to paint our painting of our imagination of our world of utopia. To believe in our ability of achieving that ‘it’ we have searched for and at last hopefully found.

The capacity to create, which one dwells with in the affectionate summer of 2012, is truly and utterly, not just remarkable, but it is indeed an achievement in its whole. To enjoy the sun rise and later the day to go back to that same spot, permitting our eyes to observe and breathe in the view highlighted by that same sun, while she bids us farewell, promising to illuminate that next morning.

Our morphodynamic universe reassures us that routine in our life should not exist. That power, which we need not to deplore but to allow the magnification of the variety and diversity in us to grow is definitely presented in this year’s summer. It signifies the original twilight of the initial strives of conception, which we need not to be oblivious about but rather, to adhere to it.

Join me in painting our ideas for the future in today’s summer. Let us not ravel around the negative attitude of the many when stating what they think is a fact: “we need to be paused in our chairs until the financial crisis is over”. We require and shall be strong to be able to differentiate between those strong negative attitudes and bounce them off. For it is unless we are awake and conscious of it, it will otherwise cloth our unfortunate weak and naked thoughts.

I present an invitation to be sturdy, positive and optimistic for we need not to forget what our wise humans before us communicated that crisis brings opportunities and pressure gives birth to frosty diamonds. I mean this as a colossal principle. I understand what D.H. Lawrence spoke about in the previous century that “it is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language. We just don’t listen”. Words spoken decades ago, yet crystal clear to this very summer!

You may very well think those writers of the past are distanced from us and hence, we know more since we have studied their history, philosophy and ideas and read their works. Perhaps few of us studied them carefully…but, to that I would like to borrow T.S. Eliot’s lexes when he heard a similar opinion long ago, he had answered: “precisely, and they are that which we know”.

Therefore, let us all understand the wisdom articulated before us and we shall mature to become that woman and that man we strive to attain no matter the circumstances and situation we are in.

Summer of 2012 removes any susurrus ideas camouflaging a bright future and equally welcomes our ears to listen to the only positive energy vibrating within us!