Tuesday, November 02, 2010



Beauty in details

Was reading an article yesterday when I came upon this wonderful concept " Look at everything as if you are looking at it for the first time " . This was follows by a couple of examples of how when you look at your wife , or your home or your friends try looking at them as if you are you are doing it for the first time , there will be a sense of excitement of having discovered something new in your life .

I have always been a person of comparatively less detail . For me the bigger picture has always been important and as soon as I grasp that I move on . I remember when I was kid I went to this painting class where the teacher asked us to paint 30 leaves . I was done in 2 days , there were kids there who had been painting the same thing for weeks , I did not understand the concept then . The teacher kept asking me to go back and refine the painting more , after a while I could not find anything else that can be done with the paintings and eventually got bored , tired and left .


Browsing further into the article mentioned above I found too paintings mentioned in it , so I checked them out . The two paintings were Van gogh's paintings - The shoes and The chair . It is believed that Van gogh spent months painting these relatively mundane things . Looking at these paintings it got me thinking on vision that the painter must have had . Every single day he must have sat down with his easel to just make sure the lace on the shoe looked perfectly like the original one , to make sure that the cushion on the chair gives you a homely feeling and so on.

Leave alone shoes how many times do we actually stop and take a nice deep look at our friends , our job , our surroundings . For us it is just the same people , the same house and the same sun rise everyday .

The whole world as they say is in a state of flux where nothing remains constant , then why is it that we find everything the same everyday . We need newer and newer things to excite us each day . I was recently having a conversation with a friend and I mentioned that maybe because I travel so much I no longer find each trip giving me the kind of adrenaline rush I used to get when I was a kid . Trips now just come down to visiting landmarks , checking them out on my list , hanging out with friends and cracking a few funny jokes but the newness of it all is missing . I have stopped embracing the fact that each one of these events occur only once in my entire lifetime and more totally I am present in each one of them , the more newer things I will be able to discover each day .

Now on anytime I am suffering from the lack of newness in my life , I plan to use the image of Van Gogh's shoes to guide me to dwell deeper into life and discover life it in all its richness !!!



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