Sometimes, I forced myself to sit down and paint. It wasn’t something I was particularly good at but it offered something I had always been wistful about. It offered a chance to start afresh. I liked reminding myself of that every now and then; it was important.
For instance, today I sat to paint with a purpose. I had an idea of painting my bruised feet in the water, and this weird metaphor to summarise how the last year was for me. This was stuck in my head for long enough for it to become an actual task. It wasn’t particularly good but it was what I had wanted it to be, but when I was done, I don’t know what happened but I immediately painted over it and kept going until I reached this odd place which resembled the sun setting but you can’t make out if it’s the sea or the mountains, and I realised that’s the fun part.
It’s like life, you know? When we just sit down to paint, even if with a purpose, we keep getting these ‘let’s do this”” or “”I’ll do that”” or “”let’s pick that one””, and we don’t stop to think once. We pick yellow over blue sometimes, and we make these decisions in the flow, and if the urge requires, we paint over it all to start afresh.
We don’t know where we’re reaching or if it even makes any sense, and often, in the end, we don’t even reach even the semblance of a masterpiece, but somehow, that choice, that starting afresh, we know it all and go through it all again, like a montage playing in our head, as soon as we look at the end result. We know how we got here, and that is oddly satisfying.
It was exactly like life, painting without a purpose, and even if you started out with a purpose, there were bound to be places where you would have to improvise. You never knew where you’d end up, but you could still manage to smile whenever you looked at what you have now, and if you couldn’t, and given you had enough left in you, you could always paint over the page. Couldn’t you?