Asking to Be Seen

One evening Michele and I walked over to the clubhouse where we live. They were having a ceramics painting night.

Most people painted what they could see. A tree. A sunset. A bird on a branch. Something you could point to and name.

I picked up a small vase.

I’d made maybe a half-dozen strokes, purple and teal, when the woman sitting next to me asked what I was painting. I didn’t know.

“Art is an expression not intended to be explained,” I said.

It was a quip meant to be funny. Something to say instead of saying I had no idea. But I liked it as soon as it left my mouth.

I kept painting. Strokes that didn’t line up and didn’t try to.

I was about three-quarters done when another woman looked over and asked, “What is that?”

“It’s a metaphor for life,” I told her. “The messy strokes are the chaos. The white space is the infinite order of the universe.”

We both laughed. It was a joke. The vase meant nothing, other than what I gave it in that moment for the sake of a conversation.

I finished the front. I left most of the back of it blank.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

I was thinking about art when I said the line, but I wasn’t only thinking about art.

Maybe a life is like that too.

We spend so much time trying to explain ourselves. Why we became who we became. Why we stayed. Why we left. Why we loved the people we loved, even when loving them hurt. Why we hurt people we loved. Why some things from fifty or sixty years ago can still find us when a certain song comes on.

There are explanations for some of it, I’m sure. Childhood. Fear. Need. Survival. Love. Loneliness. All the things we carry without knowing we’re carrying them.

But I’ve lived long enough to know that an explanation doesn’t necessarily tell us the truth about a person.

Most of the time it’s what we came up with at the table, because someone asked.

Mammy was more than what happened to her.

Pappy was more than what he did.

And I am more than what happened to me.

Maybe that’s part of what I’ve been realizing lately. I don’t need to explain everyone anymore. I don’t even need to completely understand them.

I can look back and see things I couldn’t see when I was a boy. I can acknowledge Mammy’s pain and, after all these years, finally wonder about Pappy’s too. Maybe even his hurt. One doesn’t cancel the other.

Maybe some things aren’t asking to be figured out.

Maybe they’re asking to be seen.

Art is an expression not intended to be explained.

Perhaps a life is too.

—sh