It's Enough to Drive One Mad
Do you know that feeling of great forward momentum, when you’re making excellent progress in life or work, but then something happens to take you five steps back?
It’s that feeling of running on all six cylinders, then suddenly something happens and you’re in retreat.
The last year has felt like that. So many lives interrupted. Organizational plans halted. People have said to me, “I/we were about to have our best year yet, and then....”
When you take five giant steps ahead and three back, the math says that you’re still advancing. But sometimes it feels as if you are moving back as much as you are forward.
A client and I were talking about this phenomenon recently. She had a brilliant observation about this ebb and flow in her own life. She said, “I guess I have to take some steps backwards at times so I can have a greater view. It’s like looking at a Monet.”
It is like looking at a Monet!
Claude Monet’s work was imprecise and unrealistic, yet groundbreaking and lovely. It captured the movement of life right before our eyes. He used unmediated colors to add new tones to paintings, revealing the changing of every moment. He showed the effects of light on the seasons of our lives.
Have you taken several steps back in something? What is your new perspective from here?
Monet and his colleagues were no longer in their studios, depicting what the realists had, imitative and perfect scenes. Instead, they were en plein air, outside in real light, capturing impressions of what life is. Reflecting it all with large and messy brush strokes.
He acknowledged, “For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life—the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”
Monet said it was enough to drive him mad—discovering more and more beautiful things every day that he wanted to capture.
We’re not the only ones going a bit insane with the jolting forward and back. Artists have been in this space for eternity. So, take those giant, satisfying steps backwards. Revel in them.
It’s only by experiencing this shifting context that we can reach new perspectives on our own humanity. On our realness.