The Art of Chill evolves over time. It’s a craft I’ve been practicing since birth.
In youth, it’s about taming your anxiety about the future, being okay with not knowing what lies ahead, taking your hits gracefully. It’s remaining poised and relaxed while looking at a thousand blank canvasses, with a single paint brush in your hand.
But as you age, as experience pours into your soul and fills you up, The Art of Chill becomes a different animal altogether.
If we’ve lived well, those thousand canvasses have been painted; there are no white spaces left to color.
And this creates a very different kind of anxiety and therefore a need for a new kind of Chill.
We have to be able to look at our paintings and genuinely appreciate them, especially the ones that are uninteresting and unsold. We must scour them for things we missed, find something new, something that’s always been there but’s been difficult to see.
The good news is that since we’ve changed, the paintings will too; in this way they keep giving back to us.
That’s the wisdom of age: knowing that things once considered permanent, are anything but.
So, when life gets heavy and all the gleaming white spaces seem to have disappeared.
Look again.
There’s something you missed. A thousand things you missed, a new story coming through in the twisting shapes your beautiful hand splashed out long ago.
It takes decades of a lived life to be able to see it.
This sacred message, you’ve earned.
And once you see it, once you look deeply into your own creations, the shifting patterns will tunnel up off the flat surfaces and dance in a spiral around you… loving you back and inviting you to dance with them.
And finally you’ll rest in the comfort of knowing that you don’t need more canvasses.
Just more paint.