Time & Perspective Quote by Martha Beck

Beck’s line reads like a self-help permission slip with a curatorial edge: stop waiting for “your” culture, “your” genre, or the approved canon to hand you meaning. Go hunting. “Seek” puts agency back on the reader, framing art as an active practice rather than a passive taste you either have or don’t. The breadth of “every time and place, in any form” is deliberately anti-snob. It knocks down the social machinery that ranks oil paintings over fan fiction, opera over TikTok, old masters over contemporary weirdness. The point isn’t eclecticism for bragging rights; it’s survival-by-connection.

The real center of gravity is “to connect with those who really move you.” Beck smuggles in a subtle shift: art isn’t primarily about mastery, education, or even beauty. It’s about relationship. “Those” can mean the artists, the subjects, the communities that produced the work, or even a past version of yourself that suddenly feels seen. “Really” is doing a lot of work too, distinguishing true emotional motion from the performance of being impressed.

Context matters: Beck’s brand of writing often treats personal growth as an act of attention and alignment, not grit-as-virtue. Here, artistic taste becomes an ethical compass. If you follow what moves you across eras and borders, you’re less likely to be trapped by inherited identity scripts. The subtext is quietly radical: let your inner life be shaped by chosen affinities, not by algorithms, gatekeepers, or the polite tyranny of “what people like us are supposed to like.”