Your life is a work of art that is already beautiful and complete. Each moment, a new opportunity to paint, but never for a moment lacking in completeness. When it ends, it ends, but at no point were you missing anything. It was beautiful all along.

Part II.

Art, literally, is expression on canvas.

But are we not all expressing in some sense, every moment? Expressing in words, behaviors, impulses, desires… even if we don’t see it as such. We are expressing. Even refusal to express – merely another form of expression.

Who do we want to become, in a lifetime of expressing?

For that matter, who are we?

How can we possibly become anything without first knowing who we are? Upon sufficiently exploring this – not what our parents believe we are, not what culture believes we are, not our friends, our workplace, our schools, or strangers… – but who we ourselves truly feel we are – when all else is stripped away. We discover the grandest of discoveries: there is no need to become anything than we already are. Nothing to obtain. Nothing to grab and take with us beyond death, into the cosmos from whence we came.

Yet, become we will. Why not? Though from here – from this new bedrock – “becoming” takes an entirely new meaning. Giving to the world, not taking from it. Pouring energy back out, because you see the futility in harvesting it. Your energy, your expression, was meant to be received. It was meant to be given away.

Express for the joy of expression so long as we are able. Not believing it to be necessary but seeing it as an extraordinarily and unlikely privilege, that will be gone someday.

Let us paint until the end. Celebrate the artwork we are, already as magnificent as we will ever be. But also which each additional stroke, magnificent in a new way.