Watching a 16-minute short film, a couple of years ago became my deepest inspiration for this piece of artwork. Called “Validation”, the film is about a parking assistant who is in charge of validating parking tickets. The film starts out with a depressed driver walking to the validation stand with his ticket. As he arrived the parking assistant begins to complement the driver and ends up making him smile. As the film carries on, the queue becomes bigger and bigger and everyone who leaves the stand goes off with a smile!

Looking at validation in a bigger perspective, I started to understand the meaning and the importance of it.

Every day, either by our families, either by our tutors or by our bosses, we are being bombarded by criticism and negative comments. It has become some sort of a trend. People become more self-centered and showing empathy towards each other has become very limited. Nevertheless, through personal experiences, I have realised that what encourages people to go further and accomplish their dreams or even heal their souls from an illness, is being appreciated and validated by their surroundings. When you are being validated by others, you feel accepted, you recognise your identity and you feel fulfilled by who you are.

Validation of each other can be used in any situation, by any age and by certainly everyone. It is something who everyone is in need of. It starts from a very young age (being approved by your parents) and it last till the end of your life time (approving the older generations).

Through the “Wall of Appreciation” I tried to show the meaning and importance of being validated as a person, and hopefully a reminder to the students and staff who work in the Sarah Swift (at the University of Lincoln), to acknowledge each other’s existence and the beauty that each human being has. The dots on the artwork represent “us”, the human beings. Some are very different from each other (for example the red from the yellow) and some are rather similar (for example the different shades of red). However, what has brought the yellow and the red people together are the orange (dots), who have managed to accept both even though they differ very much from each other and bring a balance and an acceptance of every single one of them.

My mind immediately flipped thoughts from the other side of the coin. So as I kept going on my way, I noticed certain people staring at the little girl and from the reactions of their faces, I recognised, not only an uncertainty, of what makes that girl so happy, but also signs of misery and bitterness, because those people couldn’t be as happy and careless as her.

That incident gave birth to this question: By pursuing happiness and always being in thirst of “something more than that”, people have lost the true meaning of life. They consider that, if they don’t satisfy their needs and fulfill their desires, their lives won’t be as beautiful as they think. But in reality, things are not that complicated. True happiness is found in simple things. Or even better, true happiness is not found in “things”. Yes, maybe setting a number of goals to accomplish during your lifetime can be good, but would their accomplishment make you truly happy, if you couldn’t share those moments of joy with your loved ones?

So, don’t waste any moment, spend your time with the people who beautify your everyday life and try to laugh as much as possible. Love and you’ll be loved back. Offer your help and you’ll be helped sometime later. Do stuff that will make you feel great, things you want to remember. Sometimes, your problems can wait for a while, because they can be dealt with.

Your happiness, simply CANNOT !!

Serena Katerina Tzortzaki Davies, (18), Undergraduate, Department of Creative Advertising, University of Lincoln, UK. Her life’s philosophy is: “to be authentic, simply live in the mind of a child!”. The image is Serena’s own artwork.

Email: sdavies.st@gmail.com