The way that life is perceived depends on judgments about our qualities, our outlook, and our will. Taken together, the result is often unexpected, even to ourselves. No matter how familiar the brush strokes and colors on our palette once seemed, our choices can bundle and evolve into something no one could have foreseen.
In every small decision we make, in every inch of our body that twitches with a burning desire to exist, we are creators. As creators, we are artists. We are judged by—and responsible for—our choices. In the act of making art, or simply in making decisions that fill our canvas, we are shaping a personality, not crushing our whole being into stardust or fashioning it from nothing.
A portrait can be drawn on paper, paint surrounding a canvas and remaining still; but life never stays still, so it can never be fully contained. We do not observe life itself so much as our ongoing effort to create, to leave something behind as we move, and to make sense of time. What is time if it does not pass? What is alive if it does not move? To move is to live, and to move is to decide… or is it? As the artists of our own lives, is it our conscious selves that shape our fate, or something beyond our will?
In the end, the brush moves. The brush moves to keep you breathing every second, and you breathe to keep the brush moving. Yet as we try to catch the essence of its movement, we realize the brush does not exist in the first place. The brush, the canvas, and the artist hide behind the brief melody we hear whenever we deeply feel, see, or listen.
To judge the artist or the decision-maker, we must recognize that life does not depend solely on our choices; it can persist regardless. Crying, ticking, booming, collapsing… All may occur in the same fleeting moment. Life is more like a spontaneous burst of laughter or music poured directly from the heart.
We try and strive to make ourselves change on the pretend-canvas we have. Our constant hunger to create is ultimately harvested from a desperate need to exist, to alter what seems unchangeable, or to stop change altogether. We seek and contain change within ourselves because we are inseparable from life.
We are not merely the artist; we are the artwork, smeared with our own colors. Like any artwork we are unique. In the end, everyone can be interpreted differently in a universe of infinite variables, can they not?
As I write this, I try to wrap my mind around the roaming possibilities that surround my words and their possible outcomes. My being moves and changes with every keystroke and with every sound that corresponds to my thoughts and my yearning to create. Yet my essence remains the same: it is human, it is time, and it is motion. If anything were to stop moving at any point, existence as a whole would cease. Everything is connected, and thus everything must move and keep moving, whether consciously or not.