Paint by Number
Did you ever do one of those paint by number paintings? I loved them! As I had absolutely no artistic skills whatsover (nada, nothing, less than zero, zip), it made me feel as if I was the greatest, the last of the famous artists!
It was so fascinating, first choosing a colour then filling in all the numbers for that colour, and yet there was no clear picture yet. Choosing the next colour and once again applying it to all the spaces for that colour. As each colour was applied, the picture gradually became recognisable. Once the last colour had been applied the picture was now complete and you could see the full impact of your glorious masterpiece. What a sense of achievement, how proud you felt, you immediately wanted to show it to everyone you knew, so that they could see your hidden talent.
Well isn’t life a bit like that? As we experience and learn new things, we get to see the bigger picture. We enter into new phases of our life each and every day, from first day at school, with all the fears we had, to graduating, to our first love, to marriage, first child, first job and all through life we are entering into new areas of our lives of which we have no idea of what the outcome will be.
It is only when we look back and see all our different colours we have painted on to our life canvas, that we can see the magic that we have created or where we had mistakenly painted in the wrong colour. We will either have a masterpiece or we have a less than perfect picture. It’s all about choices. It’s all about what we want from life - what’s acceptable to us. We can always paint over our mistakes to try and achieve that perfect masterpiece, or perchance we may be happy with a skewed picture. It is also so sad to see how sometimes we paint in the spaces that we think other people want to see, only to find that they clash horribly with the background colours we originally chose.
So as we can see, life is like a paint by number painting, as long as we strive to have that perfect picture, and as long as we keep trying to fix the mistakes, we will always have that talent we yearned for and that Masterpiece we are so proud of.