The way I want it to be

Artist Norman Rockwell describes his work as excluding the ugly, and keeping in only the idealized image...Ordinary people doing ordinary things. As he so quaintly put it, "I paint life as I would like it to be"

Life is not that dissimilar from a painting. I think when we try hard enough, almost anything can be analogous to life. I don't know exactly how painting is like life though. I would like to believe that the paintbrush is indeed in our hands, in our control. We make the strokes, we choose the colours, the outline, and hope to project on it how we are inside. Such that by looking at it, our lives, or some degree of it is explained, in the simple brushstrokes, in the careful smudges. But sometimes it seems that we are all, in the beginning, a wide sheet of untouched canvas, and others come into our lives, make their mark. Some will trample on it, others leave it torn and you are left to mend the pieces. Some make permanent indentments, others fade over time. And in the end, we are all messed up, unique, ugly yet somehow beautiful. And looking at our lives at the end, the many overlapping shades, the moments of grey and the sudden bursts of colours along the way, we can truly appreciate our lives, and the good and the bad in it.I guess we do have some control. A choice to paint within the lines, or in a haphazard fashion. To be careful with who you let in as you want to maintain a good clean surface, or to let the chaos of the many into something so personal, and it that, share a bond.

I don't know. I just hope that at the end, my painting is extrodinary, even if it is made out of the most ordinary things.