Fresh air

Standing at the balcony of a hotel overlooking the Parisian sunset. Feeling the cool fresh breeze, the buzz of the city on my skin. Bliss is in the air. The sunset has enchanted me again. This is my moment of the day, any day.

The gentle hug of wind, the sun-kissed skin, earth under my feet, my teary tired hopeful eyes gazing forward. Breathing slowly so my nose wouldn't get too cold. The new bed sheets half folded from my mid-day nap. Will there be another day?

A chamber of reflection, that hotel room of mine. I wondered, beyond reason, while lying down in bed, what manner of thought did people have while waiting for their time of eventual departure. The worries, hopes, dreams, and the countless times strangers have masturbated surrounded by these four walls. How many of them perished and how few lived on to have fulfilling lives? I couldn't count.

Moments of reflection allow us to experience life as a whole, like a painter's moment of pause, stepping back and observing the half-finished painting as a whole. It allows the painter to observe the current state of the painting and lay the canvas for his next strokes. I do wonder sometimes what color my final brush strokes will be? What a foolish thought, a painter is never done painting.

Let us pause for a moment and consider ourselves as painters and our life as a painting painted by ourselves, and take the canvas as the environment we find ourselves in. It is self evident that we don't live in isolation from others, and yet we don't draw the same figures, nor is the roughness of each patch the same. Therefore we must be all painting on the same canvas, only differing on where our first stroke was drawn.

The first stroke on an empty canvas is the genesis of a new painting; start of a new self. We are expected to be painters of our own selves, but we don't lay down the first stroke ourselves. It's our parents, caretakers who dress us, feed us, and we stand up to take their form. Until we become capable enough to hold the brush on our own, and start painting.

Maybe it's the ecstasy of this newfound freedom that makes our teenage selves want to draw themselves apart, sketch after sketch, weird and edgy, drafting who they want to be and will eventually become.

A consequence of living on the same canvas of others, is that others will either paint with us or paint over us. They can either ruin what is there in their image, or contribute to make it beautiful.