Quiet…

Quiet used to make me uncomfortable. I have spent so much of my adult life moving from one responsibility to the next that silence often felt like a space that needed to be filled. Turn on the television. Check my phone. Answer an email. Start another task. Do something.

Painting changed that for me.

There is a particular kind of quiet that happens when I paint. It isn’t complete silence. There is the sound of the brush against the canvas, the scrape of the palette knife, maybe Bob Ross playing in the background. But my mind gets quiet. The running list of things I need to do fades away. For a few hours, I am not solving anyone’s problem. I am not thinking about tomorrow. I am simply trying to decide where a tree belongs.

That quiet has become incredibly important to me, especially during a time when so much of my life has changed. There are questions I cannot answer yet. There are emotions I cannot neatly organize. Painting gives me somewhere to put all of that down for a while.

I used to think productivity meant constantly accomplishing something measurable. Now I think there is value in simply being still enough to hear yourself think. Ironically, those quiet hours at the easel often leave me better prepared to deal with everything waiting outside of them.

I still live life at a fairly fast pace. I don’t think that part of me is going anywhere. But I have learned to appreciate quiet. Sometimes peace isn’t something we find. Sometimes we create it.