Life in metaphors...

I began as they said. I wet the paper and gently dabbed paint at one corner. It spreads quickly.
I apply another dab of paint and wait.
First it was blue, then green. Then yellow and red.
The water trapped in the paper is blurring the boundaries. Somehow, nothing is clear and distinct.

The colors are spreading. Things are moving out of my control as the colors diffuse, spread, mix and leave trails behind. I sat there watching.
Waiting.

A small panic rising in my heart. Will this be ok? Should I wipe it off? Should I dry it? Should I dab a  little more? Or maybe a little less? What should I do?

But, I hold on tight. I sit on my hands (literally) to stop myself from doing something. The effort to not do anything is enormous. The urge is over-whelming.
It is completely unnerving to sit but I have to wait. I have to see how this plays out.

And so I do.

I let the colors follow their course. I let the water dry at its own pace. I wait for the water-soaked, mellowed, cold-pressed paper to return to its dry, rigid self.
And it does in a few minutes. Some really long minutes but minutes nonetheless.

I now see that my panic was unjustified. Because the colors had only merged and melded seamlessly into this beautiful, complete whole that I couldn't have painted on my own. The incline of the surface, the water, the colors, the air, the humidity and my brush strokes - they had all come together to give rise to something unexpectedly beautiful and complete.

A few months ago, I would have panicked, interfered and stopped the colors from mixing on their own. I would have taken charge and dabbed, dried, erased, outlined. I would have done things to get the image I wanted without letting it emerge.

I would have drawn lines to trap the objects, the people and the world into my tiny-little outlines. They would have fit into those boxes and they would have stayed like that - fixed, unmoving and sharp. Surreal to the point of being fake.

But today, the image emerged on its own, unaffected by my outlines, boxes or preconceived notions. Freely the shapes blended and rose as the colors danced with each other (and also fought sometimes). The image was filled with soft, blurry lines that invited my eyes to linger. To imagine.

It was filled with possibilities - and new possibilities arose as I saw again. Shapes shifted, lines blurred, objects emerged and appeared. It was dynamically fixed.

My former sharply defined world seemed like a distant past. This new blurry world was my present reality. It was real, surreal and ethereal - all at the same time.
I, a person of action, who could not be a passive spectator, learned a lesson today about passivity. I saw my life and myself a little clearer in those blurry lines and fuzzy shapes.

This is a lesson I need to remember.
I need to learn to BE. To be a little passive when situations demand so with the hope and the faith that the consequences will not necessarily be bad.
Complete control is not always the solution we seek. Sometimes, one has to wait for order to emerge from the chaos.

I always knew that art mimicked life but today, for me, art carried a valuable life-lesson too.
The lesson to just BE. To learn to wait for things to emerge before pounding them into existence.