So it’s December, and from my blog it appears that I was MIA for a couple months. Here’s the summary: I came back from London in September and picked up where I left off. Except suddenly I didn’t have enough space to make art, I didn’t have enough time to look for exhibition opportunities, and I had no ideas of what to paint. I came up with enough justifiable excuses to fuel hours of rebuttal with anyone brave enough to bring up the fact that I had stopped doing something I loved.
Then I went out of town for a weekend and found some inspiration. But it was the kind of inspiration leaving me wishing that my life had occurred in the 19th century when I could buy a small shack near a beautiful pond and live off the profits of my crop of beans--a life spent working in the morning, swimming in the afternoon, and reading by the candlelight.
So I came home even more frustrated than when I left. But I eventually started to figure out some stuff. For example: 1) I need to live in the present, and 2) I need to act in the present.
I highly recommend this devotional given by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland at my alma mater in 2009, entitled “Remember Lot’s Wife.” Elder Holland points out that in the Old Testament story, Lot’s wife met her unfortunate fate because she was not only looking back, but looking back longingly. As he states:
“To yearn to go back to a world that cannot be lived in now; to be perennially dissatisfied with present circumstances and have only dismal views of the future; to miss the here-and-now-and-tomorrow because we are so trapped in the there-and-then-and-yesterday—these are some of the sins, if we may call them that, of … Lot’s wife.”
The second realization, that I need to act in the present, struck me as I was thinking about my hopes and dreams for the future and the Lonestar song “What About Now” came on the radio. I don’t particularly like this band, but a lot of country songs are grandfathered into my playlist since I grew up with them. Anyway, as I listened to the lyrics,
“We could hang around this town, forever making plans,
But there won’t ever be a better time to take this chance,”
I realized that the things I always meant to do just needed to be done. Now. There was nothing standing in my way of doing the small things that had been on my list for weeks, like renewing my library card, or even the big things, like finding a studio space or some other solution to my painting issues. That’s it. The answer was to just do it.
It’s funny how simple it is to take care of a molehill when you finally realize it isn’t actually a mountain.
