If you don't rejoice in the good times, you'll have no
resilience when the bad times come.
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| Breaking Storm, by Carol L. Douglas. I missed painting American Eagle's fitout this year because I'm quarantined. |
People ask me how I know when a painting is done. “When I’m
sick of working on it,” I answer. All creative work is a compromise between our
vision and capabilities. This means not just skill but environmental factors.
If you doubt that, try singing through a headache.
Our current crisis involves more compromise than usual. Our
supply chain is broken in odd ways; that includes some scarcity of art supplies.
Carol at Salt Bay Art Supply in
Damariscotta told me she runs low on white and black paint first. The white I
understand; black, however, is a mystery to me.
Hammond Lumber has
been great about accommodating my quarantine, but they can’t send me what they
don’t have. That includes color charts. Each time I climb on a ladder to work
on my current project, I wince at the state of the crown moulding. It needs
paint, but I can’t match the other white in the room without a color chart. It’s
difficult, but I’m deferring the trim to some future time.
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| Cadet, by Carol L. Douglas |
I commiserated with two well-known artist friends yesterday. “This
has me working twice as hard to look for ways to continue to make a living,”
said one. The other has taken a night job to feed his family. “I can still
paint during the day,” he said. They both have school-age kids and are making compromises
to survive.
We live in a pandemic mindset. In some ways, that’s
liberating. There has been blessed silence about some of our previously-consuming
passions. Food allergies, the upcoming elections and gender identity are three things
I’m happily not hearing about right now.
The bleak, short days of winter seems halcyon in retrospect,
even if I didn’t have the Christmas I thought I wanted. It’s a pity that we so
often ruin the present with our anxieties. Seizing the day is not just a recipe
for overall happiness; it gives us the strength to roll through the bad times
when they (inevitably) come.
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| Flood tide, by Carol L. Douglas |
When a mother takes a newborn home from the hospital, she is
overwhelmed with physical and mental fatigue. Years later, that isn’t what we remember
first; we remember our joy. I’m not sure why the human mind is wired this way,
but it’s something we have to work to overcome.
The Black Death was the most devastating pandemic in
human history. It killed a third of Europe’s population and around 20% of
people worldwide. If you lived through it, it was an unmitigated horror. Yet it
ultimately broke the caste economy of the Middle Ages. Serfs could leave the
manor and find work, which freed most people from a life no better than slavery.
Land prices dropped. Meat consumption rose, because you can raise cattle with
fewer hands than you can raise corn. In fact, the plague set the conditions
that eventually led to the creation of the middle class.
All of which is to say that not every disaster is an
unmitigated disaster. Sometimes, trouble is a way for society to kick off its
stays and try something new. What if these turn out to be our Good Old Days?
