The Canvas of Life

Grief is an unpredictable thing. It has its ups and downs and twists and turns, and right when you think you've got it figured out, you're taken for another ride. You readers must get tired of hearing me make the same realizations time and time again, and I'm doing it again I suppose. But hey, it's the grief train and it's out of my control.

To be honest, I'm actually not in a bad place at all. I've had a lot of wonderful things happen over the last few months. I have been swimming and training harder than ever, taking more classes, teaching more students, and was privileged to give the keynote address at the annual Suzuki music teacher conference. I'm grateful for how life continues to progress and I occasionally have moments when I think, "Wow. I am seriously happy and loving life". That's something I wondered if I'd ever have again and here I am two years out from injury, finally feeling it some... And hoping to feel it more and more.

For some reason, over the last few weeks I've been more aware of my losses. Most days I wake up and just get to my normal activities of daily living. But recently I've been waking up thinking, "I don't want to transfer into a shower chair, I want to stand up. I want to go to the bathroom standing up, and I want to shower standing up. Life is so hard..." The confusing thing is that I wasn't remembering all these kinds of things even four to six months ago, but here I am again reliving some of that same pain without rhyme or reason as to why it has resurfaced.

I was at the gym the other day, lifting away to my music which often happens to be classical. A song that is very close to my heart came on and I was totally thrown into a strange sobbing mess. There I was in a tank with my lifting hooks on, with tears welling up so much that I had to lean over to let out a few silent sobs and dry my eyes. I miss it all so deeply. It's a pain that is indescribable, not so much because of its intensity, but because of its unique quality. There is truly a bitter-sweet quality to loss. The feelings associated are comprised of the love of what I had as well as a sadness of the loss of said love.

Emotion is a beautiful thing to me, even the difficult emotions, and I often imagine human emotions to be very much like the paint palette of an artist. On this palette is a wide variety of colors ranging from the lightest of lights to the darkest of darks, ensuring the contrast and shading of any conceivable image.

When my canvas is filled only with dark shades of black, charcoal or grey, I only wish I could have never known the darker side of the palette. I find myself wishing that I could have spent my life painting a mural of Easter pinks and yellows, without any thundercloud colors to rain on the perfect image of what I wanted for my life. But after some meditation and life experience, I find myself deeply valuing the dark shades nearly as much as the lighter ones. Not only do the grey and blacks make the whites whiter, but they also carry with them a beauty of their own.

There are some beautiful images that simply cannot be painted using only the pretty, bright end of the spectrum. In any art form, depth requires contrast. Some of the most stunning images or passages of music seem to carry with them the very powerful disparity of color and light, or tension and resolution. In a similar way, some of my most beautiful and vivid memories carry with them deeply contrasting feelings. Truly, the brightest whites I have ever had the privilege of experiencing only ever existed because they were preceded by moments of pitch black. 

We all know that tar-black paint on a solid black background would not be likely to yield an appealing image... but after the last several years of life, I'm not sure the white on white would look so good either. Life is beautiful, because life has contrast. Life is beautiful to me not only because it has wonderful parts to it, but also because it has difficult and tragic parts to it. There are parts of my life that are tragic. There are parts of my life that are beautiful. I am who I am because of both... and I hesitate every time I think I would change the ratio of darks to lights on what is the beautiful canvas of my life.