Living your life unpainted to painted

You can choose this style if you like, but for best results,
always go from unpainted to painted!

June 10, 2014
..........41/365

I learned many trades while I was a monk, but painting was definitely one of my favorites.  It isn't easy, and it can take forever when you do it yourself, but the finished product is your ultimate reward. 

Brother Stephen taught me how to paint, and though there are a lot more instructions and morsels of advice worth eating up, this one is the first, and the most basic.  He taught me to always go from unpainted to painted, because if you go from painted to unpainted, your brush will be going into the perfect, painted area and smudging the paint forward.  So it's always better to just take the brush from the unpainted area, and glide it along smoothly into the already painted area.  That way, the lines will run in smoothly, and the paint will blend in uniformly. 

And because I like to reflect on, well, just about everything, this got me to thinking.  Is the unpainted to painted rule something I can apply to life in general?  Yes, I realized, it is! 

By just changing the words a bit, we can formulate a new mantra for ourselves: Always move from the challenging area in your life into the satisfied, fully realized one, and not the other way around.  But what does this really mean?  And why not the reverse?

If we were to just fake our way into being happy and successful in some part of our life, whether it be the workplace, a relationship, or a friendship, we'd forever be smudging the paint, and showing ourselves to be a fraud.  When we instead move slowly into the better world we want for ourselves from the place of nothingness (no paint), we transition more smoothly.  We blend in, in the best way possible.  Unpainted to painted.

Throughout my life, from elementary school to high school, to college and the monastic life, and to the life and lives I've been living now leading up to my 40th birthday next year, I have learned this lesson hundreds of times.  I've learned it not just from the times it's worked well for me, but just as often from the times when I failed to take my own advice.  I've made myself a fraud, faked my way into a situation to impress a teacher, a friend, or a colleague.  By throwing myself into a given situation, and acting like I could handle things without fully growing into them naturally, I smudged the paint.  I stuck out.  I failed.

For all the times I tried faking my way upward, I learned much more often to just take my time, learn about what I needed to do, and trust the path forward.  The paint looks so nice over there on the colorful side of the wall, but it's always better to start yourself out on the unpainted side.  And then, when you can, just glide in smoothly.