I've had the wonderful opportunity this quarter to take a painting class. It's an "experimental" class and we get to pretty generally paint whatever we want. The assignments are beautifully broad, allowing creativity to fully flow without the constraints specific assignments often provide.
It's been a great journey, learning to paint. I've never really painted before, which has caused a bit of insecurity. I'm learning, though, slowly developing my own style and learning to just embrace the medium and enjoy the process, rather than getting so caught up in the end result I don't actually learn anything along the way.
That's a bit how life is, actually. Sometimes it's so easy to focus so much on the future, on where you'll be in a few years, even just a few months, or maybe just a few days, if the weekend is near.
But when you get caught up in what's to come, you can't embrace and enjoy what's in the here and now. Life is about the journey, as much about where you go as how you got there.
When painting, if I focus all my attention on what my painting will look like in the end, I'll lose the opportunity to explore, to play, to embrace the process of painting and deviate from the original plan to create something entirely new and equally exciting as my original idea. Or maybe I play around and it utterly fails, but I learn from it and can apply that failure to my future attempts and endeavors.
If you never try anything, then it's true you'll never fail. But you'll also never succeed. Living life in fear of failing is no way to live at all. It's all about the process, the journey, the adventure.
That's what life is. A great big adventure. It's unknown, like any exciting adventure should be.
When you watch a movie or read a book for the first time, you have no idea what will happen, where the characters will go, how they will get there, or who they will become along the way. You travel with them, experiencing what they experience, feeling their fear, becoming excited along with them. When they're in danger, your heart races too, when they're excited, you are happy as well, and when they make it through safely, you breath a great sigh of relief. You don't know where they're going, the story is about the journey to get there and what they learn and who they become along the way.
It's about who we are. It's about who we become. That's why we go through our trials and suffering, joy and excitement, love and care. So we can paint a beautiful painting, or a meaningful painting, and learn along the way. It's as much about the end result as how you got there.
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