Life's a Canvas

The walls of my new basement bedroom are the whitest white. I don’t mind the color, given that my overhead lights have less wattage than a candle and my one window looks out at a recessed wood wall. White keeps the room from looking too dim. Or, at least less dim than it might otherwise.

But my room is big, the walls long, and I do not have adequate furniture or decor to prevent a certain blankness from affecting the overall feeling of the place. My few sparse pictures and posters seem more to call attention to the vast white spaces than to fill them. There is a particularly large, particularly empty stretch on the wall opposite my bed. I look at it at night before turning off my lamp and it yawns back at me.

When I moved, I brought a big blank canvas from my house and my box of paints to help fill this void. I haven’t done anything with them yet or decided what colors to use. I’m waiting for a sudden rush of inspiration.

I do that a lot in life, I think. Wait for the inspiration, the motivation, the right opportunity, to find me. I tend to put off decisions with the assumption that the right choice will somehow just creep into my mind when I’m not paying attention. A lot of the time, this works out ok for me. I’m good at being patient when it means not interrupting the status quo.

But I'm realizing that like my wall, my hopes for the future will remain a blank and unfulfilled reality unless I do something to invigorate them. Sometimes great opportunities fall into your lap with little or no effort on your part, but mostly that just happens in movies. Passivity gets me and my canvas nowhere. I can’t produce a work of art unless I actually pick up my brush and dip it in the paint.

Can you tell I’m feeling guilty about not spending very much time on my writing this month?