Life…
…the greatest Art
It was a chance remark by one of the PhDs that was working under my guiding Professor in college, while we were standing below a cherry tree, loaded with cherries and clicking photographs. He said, Living, is an Art.
Truer words have never been said. And the more I think of it, the more it grows on me. I’ve extended it to — Life’s the greatest art, and every man an artist of his own life.
Think about it.
A painter takes paint and makes a painting and pours his soul into it, trying to portray his feelings towards the slice of life being painted. Or he pours out the reality as his soul would like to see it.
A singer, a guitarist uses voice, music, to the same effect. A photographer does the same trying to capture or create a slice of life, as he sees it or wants it to be.
But what’s the most basic, the most elemental aspect of life?
Moments.
That’s ultimately what each life is made of. Each of us gets an unknown stock of moments to live. And the only true control we have in life, is in how we live them. We don’t have full control over the moments. We can’t control(as yet) a rain, a blooming flower, but we can control how we react to it, see it, live it. That’s all we can ever control. That’s the ultimate ‘paint’ we have to paint our life with.
So the ultimate artist is one who imagines his life as his art, and using each moment, bit by bit, he builds his masterpiece. Now that masterpiece might have him painting the greatest paintings, but only if that’s the life he wants to paint. Someone else might want to make a life spent struggling throughout. Black as it might be, it’s still life. It’s still beautiful. It’s still art.
Someone might want a villain’s role. Another the Hero. Another a supporting artist who does his job so well that he overshadows the Hero who’s not playing his role well. It’s all roles. It’s all stories, constructed magnificently, on the canvas of Life.
To live then, is to conceive your masterpiece. Then once you’re sure that it is the painting you want. Then to let go. Let yourself loose. Completely cool. Completely calm. And go about the slow hard, yet beautiful and arousing work, of putting each moment in it’s place on the storyline.
Imagine that you’re Neo who’s just woken up the artist in him.
You see the moments
You see the canvas.
You get about catching each moment carefully. You see it. You taste it. You feel it. And then you, only YOU, give it what it needs to mean in the story line. What note it hits, what beauty it shows, what direction it gives, what role it plays in moving the story forward.
In the matrix world, a falling tree can mean that the tree was old and hit its programmed end time. Or it is a reminder that you’d set yourself in your dreams, to not go that side today. Or the time where your character feels for the first time what death in front of him means like. It’s your story. You make the moment what you want it to be.
Slowly, each moment at a time, the story develops. The meaning in each moment adds to the one before it, to the one after it, to the whole story, and what comes out is beauty in astonishing leaps and bounds. As the story develops, you can’t help but start to feel pride, joy, love, for what you’re building. What you’re arranging it all into.
As you walk ahead,
you see others like you. Some painting alone. Some together. Some just happy to be part of someone else’s masterpiece. But everyone playing his own very perfect, very significant part in the whole.
You interact with them. In different ways, giving importance to the story as it had already unfolded before you took the Red pill. So some you take as friends. Some become brothers. Some play the opposite sex, to add colour to the whole movie. But you remain free in how to cast each one of them in your story.
Let’s create the stories of our lives like the artists we are. Merging so fully into the art…that after a while no difference remains between the art and the artist.
THAT, would be a life worth living!
— — —
Love, Nikhil
