Be the artist of yourself

When a priest takes off his collar or a Muslim woman removes her headscarf or the pope takes off his ceremonial robes or when we all stand naked and alone; we must decide who we are without the peripherals we adorn ourselves with. We get lost and entangled in the external layers of life and we miss the beauty of ourselves; we flee from the person we are and the state in which we were thrown into the world.

However, it is precisely this state that contains all the things we need to become a true artist of ourselves, creating an art all of our own. We can do this because we are free to think another thought, therefore allowing us to redefine and resist the external definition of what others want us to be. This creates a silence in which we can approach ourselves in the crowd. We can then sit in the audience of our daily lives and assess how we react to what happens. This allows us to pick up our paintbrush and instead of using paint scattered around our cultural surroundings, we use the neglected paint inside of us to choose a reaction and paint the world in our own colours. Then we are free to be who we are...