Paint Your LifePosted by simon on February 10th, 2009
I don’t know what happened. I can’t sit down and pinpoint a single atomic moment. It was a process, imagine a set of watercolors being mixed by seismic activity. It would create a wonderfully bizarre melting of colors that you can’t begin to appreciate until you consider how it occurred. I’m finding that lately words lack the ability to describe the mixing of the watercolors in my life. There are so many aspects that are affected by this process it’s hard to isolate the affects on one another. Much less, how the watercolors were made from some plant dye and imported to my palette. How the paper was constructed and bleached. Then how all these elements were in the right place at the right time for the shifts in the earth’s crust to allow them to mix on a canvas making something randomly beautiful and perfect.
“I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream”
-Vincent van Gogh
We start this life with nothing and are given guidance by family, friends, culture, religion, schooling and many other sources. Then one day we realize we have a particular palette with which we get to paint our lives. Yet, the colors aren’t right, the paper is cheap and our brush is someone else’s. So we set out to improve what we have all the while we are still painting. Not just on our canvas but others as well. We help paint the lives of others with our actions. When you have great people in your life they add to the richness and color of your life as they critique your brush strokes.
Though, sometimes we forget ourselves and our actions have unintended side effects. We will say things we don’t mean and deny our true outlook on life. People will influence the way we act and feel, which given enough persuasion will lead us to betray ourselves. Given the appropriate circumstances, for a single instance, we will betray the very nature that we have spent a lifetime creating. It is a tricky thing to remain in a natural state offering only your true intentions. My understanding of the definition of “living in the now” or “natural state” has been changing. It requires you to remain unaffected by others motivations and consider your natural state above all others.
This proves difficult when we allow ideas like “good and evil” to cloud our judgment or even rule out whole options because of how someone else judges the action. Good and Evil are just a facade people use to empower themselves and allow them to justify their actions without recourse when acting out against their so called “evildoers”. Maybe it’s just the little catholic in me that attributes such power to “Good and Evil”, but it’s a hard pill to swallow when you are looking at things from a big picture.
The idea of a right and wrong is so flawed, yet so widely accepted in Western Culture. The action is only good or evil based on the “doer”, what they are feeling and the perception of the society that observes these actions. In one society it may be “evil” for a starving man to steal, in another a vendor may be required to provide food for those who are starving. From one point of view a group of people are evil and need to be removed from society, from another they may just be misunderstood. So when it comes to doing the right thing vs the wrong thing, I’ll just do what seems natural. Now I’m not talking about having people running around doing whatever they want, though I admit it does sound like that. Describing what is natural is like describing to a society that has never killed, what it is to kill. It is such a foreign concept that they wouldn’t understand it and probably be repulsed or take it as a joke. Our Western Culture is not exactly open to the idea of “natural” and all it entails.
If you have ever been around a four year old, you have witnessed what “natural” is. You will know there is nothing “evil” or “good” about the child. It is simply living in a natural state of emotions and desires. Logic adds a level of complexity to life, it makes all actions a balance of outcomes and consequences. We are forced to consider the whole and not just the self. As logic joins the picture, I would venture to guess you enter the domain of Nietzsche’s “Overman”. I say these things so you can begin to compare our actions and considerations with a four year old and Nietzsche’s “Call to power”. Not to insult, but to show how difficult the balance between the cultural/adult world and the world of our inner child.
“Power corrupts, but absolute power is kind of neat.”
When we consider power we realize we are constantly sizing people up and judging them against ourselves and those we know. We forget who’s opinion of us really matters. Recently I feel I’ve been commissioned to create a new painting for my life. I’ve gathered many of the appropriate paints, canvas and brushes and I’m preparing to begin a masterpiece. I want the masterpiece to describe just how lucky I’ve been and how I’ve managed to get through this life by giving into unseen things. By putting my fate out into the universe and letting it direct me in my day to day actions. Did you know I decided to go into computer science on a coin toss? It was between Computer Science and Micro Biology, I believe heads was Computer Science. I only tell you this because it was one of those kind of decisions you generally don’t leave up to chance but I find my favorite way to make a 50/50 decision is just to flip a coin and keep on walking. Thus far I have lived a very blessed life. I want to use the word “good” but acceptable by my standards is probably better. How do I know this, because I’ve spent quite a bit of time with me and I feel great about me.
“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things”
Edgar Degas
The feelings we have allows us to gauge how well we live and fit into society. I once wrote about AI agents and their fitness routines and feedback loops. Feelings are nothing more then our fitness routines and feedback loops. They let us know when we succeed and when we fail. They allow us to criticize ourselves. It has been said, “I am my own worst enemy” and “I am my harshest critic.” We know our weaknesses and we know when we lie and betray ourselves. We get to choose whatever we want to make of this life. Though sometimes we are swayed by external influences and find ourselves obsessed with our job, religion, house, car, clothes, etc. Each not really the thing that defines us, only concepts and goals we align ourselves with to just make it through the end of the day without going crazy in a society that doesn’t have our best interests in mind.
“When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”
- Pablo Picasso
There are a variety of groups which are constantly trying to brainwash us and leave us powerlessly under their control. What is the prefect citizen, one who pays his taxes, uses no governmental programs and follows all laws? What is the perfect Religious person, one who pays their tithes, donates their time to help the church’s causes, gets new converts and never breaks any of their rules? They try to remove our ability to criticize ourselves and give us their own values to fall in line with. The killer is that we accept them. We accept them and choke on them until we are old, scared and close minded. If we are lucky we realize what has been stripped away from us and have a few precious moments to make amends with our self and not some one else’s life views. Some people are unlucky enough to be raised by radicals who only accept a single point of view and for them their suffering must be great. While I was raised Catholic my parents were anything but radicals.
“The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”
- Pablo Picasso
I see my mother and father on the weekends. I love them both dearly as I know they love me. They have provided the backbone of morals and philosophy that have allowed me the freedom to question them and their beliefs. They are not afraid of logic and realize when they have been bested. Their natures have been exposed to me in many moments and they are the kind of people you should be so lucky to have in your corner when life gets hard.
With that said, as a child growing up I always told myself I would never be my father. I never wanted to live the life he lived. I think it was the control he dictated over my life that made me feel this way. While my parents were open to logic there were still things that were not up for discussion. I wanted to do everything I could to spite him and be my own success. What I didn’t realize was the sacrifices he made or the change in roles he had gone through for me.
“I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.”
- Sigmund Freud
Recently I went to my parents and for the first time in as far back as I can remember, I was shown pictures of my infanthood and told baby stories. It seems I used to enjoy emptying the lower kitchen shelves of their pots and pans. It was a tireless job but I did it everyday until childproof locks were put on all the cabinets but one. I was allowed to empty this cabinet everyday, which I did with great satisfaction. (Mom has pictures to prove it) What I’m getting at is they gave me wonderful colors to begin painting my life with. While there are still pieces I am working on, my mother’s infinite patience and my fathers constant generosity. While I have my faults, I feel I do them proud in the day to day living of my life.
“When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.”
- Brian W. Aldiss
Up through college, I had much more patience and generosity then I do now. It seems my entering the professional world has jaded me and raised my expectations of my co-workers. Though I suppose that is the problem with growing up and having to depend on others, when someone is doing something professionally you expect them to have a level of skill and when they don’t frustration is sure to ensue. It is hard to help those with whom you have high expectations of, since you feel that they are letting you down. Previously work/school were easy and seldom required expectations of anyone, which made it easier to be generous to those who needed help, whether they realized it or not.
“We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.”
- Ben Okri
Adult society changes a person, the childhood games of old are now seemingly fights for survival in a “dog eat dog” world. Depending on the person it will either fill them with ambition or grind them too hard and break their will. I feel most people are not ready for this world, it’s like this game of life is over their heads and they are just blindly running around grasping at anything they can find to help them fit in.
These wandering sheep are looking for someone to tell them how to live and what to do as they can’t quite figure it out. They grasp for anything that will offer them solutions on how to live their life. But I can’t blame the average person, hell I grasp at as many sources of information as I can to try and make my own decisions and half the time I just find more questions. But I’ll tell you what, with every answer I can find the colors of my life become a little more vibrant. With every new experience I gain a new shade, with each new skill another brush.
“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”
-Henry Ward Beecher
There are certain things I have come to appreciate that allow me a level of freedom that I find few people share. I am mortal, you are mortal, I will not always have my health and you will not always have your health. Fear beyond the natural fear used by our survival instincts is just a method of control instilled in us by those who seek power. Once you accept these things, I mean really accept that all life is temporal and fear is control. Then it all comes down to what kind of masterpiece would you like to make with your life?
“There has never been a time when you and I have not existed, nor will there be a time when we will cease to exist. As the same person inhabits the body through childhood, youth, and old age, so too at the time of death he attains another body. The wise are not deluded by these changes.”
- Bhagavad Gita