An Adventure for the Soul
Aria's first season is a breath of tranquility. Like an oasis in the desert, this show brought me relief and tranquility over different periods of my life as I watched it. Perhaps due to its nature (or perhaps due to mine), it took me a while to watch everything, and the whole experience ended up taking pretty much a whole year. It would be cool if I had watched each episode for a month, but I wasn't that organized. I ended up just watching it whenever I felt like it and I don't think it was a bad decision.
Aria's episodes bring me a much sought respite with the focus and celebration of the "tiny" aspects of life, often ignored in my reality over "more important" matters that the industrial world decides deserve the attention. In a world of money, status, power and of course, the internet, who would care that rainy or snowy season started? Who would look at a new year with wonder and joy wondering how it'll turn out? I think that magical look has been robbed off of many people's hearts, and I believe Aria's characters, especially Akari, might be able to help dig out that magic back to the surface of your heart, like it helped mine.
I'm not trying to say anything grandiose like "this anime changed my life!", but once again, life is not always about the "great" stuff. It's also about the tiny stuff. Both the great and the tiny live together to create this world we live in, and it's quite the wonderful thing that they're able to relate like so. Also remember that "wonderful" doesn't mean "good" necessarily. It means that it makes you full of wonder, which sounds a bit more on a gray area, at least to me.
Aria helped me realize that life is full of different seasons, and each season has something to show me, even the ones that bring some sort of pain or struggle with them, and that's alright. Embracing each season with its different colors, makes life more special, not less, and I hope to be able to do that in my life, living it to the fullest, loving it even when it's very difficult to do so. In those moments, may I be reminded of the "tiny" things, so that I may realize that there is no such thing as a "tiny" thing.
Anyway, this might have seen like a weird trip to some of you, but in a way I'm trying to reproduce a bit of what it feels like to be in the world of Aria. Whether I've fulfilled my objective or not, I hope you too may find solace to the difficult periods of your life, even if it doesn't come from the world of Aria. If you do feel invited to this world though, you'll be sure to find quite the interesting journey, surrounded by cheerful, colorful characters that are also going through their particular struggles, with you, like a true adventure of the soul.
