As we move out of lockdown and into something close to what we previously understood as normal life, there is a sense of trepidation. Some feel nervous, embarking on life outside the home again – if you are living with anxiety, there might have been something comforting about the level of control and consistency that lockdown life can bring, even as the news outside raged.
But there is also a great opportunity here. I feel my life is a blank canvas for the first time since my teenage years, when life seemed to open out before me with endless opportunity and possibility.
What is it that I want to put back into my life? Who are the people that I want to spend my time and energy with? How will I balance the things I have gained during this strange period (a beautiful garden, more time for reading, silence and repose), with my desire to see new things (travel, the ocean, enlightening exhibitions)?
I am also 50 this year, which seems to mark a turning point. There have been others, the turn of each decade seems to bring some new focus to life that wasn’t there before: young children in my 30s, work in my 40s and now this: grown up children who are a delight, treading their newly independent paths, increasingly away from home.
As I take some time to contemplate the colours, textures and accents with which I plan to paint, the one thing I know I don’t want to do is rush.
There are some spaces that I will certainly leave blank: time, space, yoga and the luxury of silence are the four corners of living well for me. But as for the things I will positively choose to paint across my canvas? They will be deliberately and carefully chosen. This is not the Jackson Pollock of my early years as a mother, the sombre Rothko of my early 40s or the riotous Keith Haring of my 20s. This is something that only I can paint, with my half century of lived experience and wisdom.
I fully intend to consider each stroke of the brush carefully, to choose wisely and from my own instinct. The shining white spaces are very important and I will guard them carefully, but there will also be joyful explosions of colour and the paler shades of quiet times with beloveds; the dark shadows we all must face will be embraced by that colour and light.
I simply don’t have room for the fruitless, pointlessly noisy brightness that shouts the loudest but contains scant benefit. I choose something different this time. How will you paint yours?