I made the mistake of thinking that life was about getting it right: the right choices, the right skills, the right discipline. No time wasted on the path to my "best life". Success, I believed, was a formula, with perfection the goal, originality a bonus. But I was wrong.
Great beauty, when it comes, is an accident, a confluence of circumstances so complex and beyond our capacity for vision that it can arrive only as a surprise and beheld, never captured. It is not ours to hold or to keep. No matter how finely tuned the instrument, we are not the wind that plays.
If post modernism has taught me anything, it is that I should not allow what I know to cloud what I see. There is no ladder to climb, no line to follow. There is only a question: what lies before me now, and how do I wish to meet it? Do yesterday's truths, yesterday's rituals, still answer the purpose of today? Or must I start afresh, a blank page before me, and a large and clumsy child's crayon the only tool available to wield? If the latter, then I shall scribble joyfully, messily, gloriously filling the day with new mistakes, new experiments. Because there is no mastery, no arrival. Only a blank page on which to draw.
Great beauty, when it comes, is an accident, a confluence of circumstances so complex and beyond our capacity for vision that it can arrive only as a surprise and beheld, never captured. It is not ours to hold or to keep. No matter how finely tuned the instrument, we are not the wind that plays.
If post modernism has taught me anything, it is that I should not allow what I know to cloud what I see. There is no ladder to climb, no line to follow. There is only a question: what lies before me now, and how do I wish to meet it? Do yesterday's truths, yesterday's rituals, still answer the purpose of today? Or must I start afresh, a blank page before me, and a large and clumsy child's crayon the only tool available to wield? If the latter, then I shall scribble joyfully, messily, gloriously filling the day with new mistakes, new experiments. Because there is no mastery, no arrival. Only a blank page on which to draw.