To Be or Not ...

When you look at this picture, tell me what you think it means?

Go ahead and take three deep breaths and slowly take in this amazing print.

Last week while I was at the Austin Christmas Bazaar with Lily, I saw this signed print hanging in a booth.  I found myself circling back to this piece of art, feeling a great deal of attraction for it. It was like it was calling to me. I  think the last time I bought artwork was my first year in relationship with Sharon, and that would be nearly 20 years now, before we married or right around that time anyway.

It's hanging up in my bedroom, on the wall across from my bed. The colors match my room perfectly, as though it was meant to hang there. It is almost eerie how well it matches that paint on the wall.

Lily and I have taken to asking people who come over for their interpretations. In fact, Lily was telling me she's had the image on her mind and she's found her interpretation of it is deepening and changing over time inside herself.

Here is what it means to me. If you look carefully, the person who first enters the painting is carrying a ball that is fully lit and he/she is standing erect and calm and seems present. As this person progresses through time, they start to slump, almost with some form of obligation or defeatism (with the events of their lives ...) and their light is starting to dim more and more as it remains in their hand.

Then there is a point where this person is struck with a deeper insight and the light is joined with its heart and the person turns as though it has found a way to choose life - to BE in life more fully.  Had this person decided to just give in to the status quo and do what's easiest in living (if they had settled), then over time the light she/he holds slowly goes away -- you see it dropped by the wayside.  The lost love, the lost opportunity, and the lost passion she/he was afraid to embrace are sitting on the ground, cold and unconnected and becoming dim.

It's easy for me to see how we do this in our lives. As we get older, we find ourselves maybe at a seminar in our 30s, or possibly church, and we find a new crossroads that brings us a greater sense of ourselves - and being-ness. Then life gets hard again and we wander around trying to make changes that don't seem to really bring us what we want more of in our life. The title of the art is "To Be or Not" by Scott Moore. Interesting that I should find this piece.

The challenge each day in our relationships with the people we live with or in just existing in the daily grind of work is finding a way to bring that light we carry -- that passion for love and living our lives fully -- forward to get what we really want in us and close to us.  The often-picked choice is simply to let it go, let it slide into a kind of dull mundaneness, because we think that's easier and less trouble.

Or sometimes out of fear of truly becoming who we are as a person, especially as we become older in life, we let the light go, often so slowly we don't recognize that is what is occurring. We just don't think we really have what it takes to be as happy as we had dreamed was possible. The light slowly grows more dim. What do you really want in your life? Trust me; I see how short life is now, and living it more fully and sharing that with others is precious.

I think we're each on this path in life and we don't know what it will bring - except love and challenge and changes - things that we would never expect or want, for that matter, yet we then live into and open up new life from a new unfathomable point.  It is so mindboggling at times -- and it is what it is.

You tell me now what you see.

With love
Tom

Comments

[Donna Fulton]

I love this piece that you bought - such a wonderfully powerful image! I see such hope and purposeful choosing in it!

Take care, you two!