It's A Blur

Once an art teacher told us that if we wanted to appreciate a painting, we ought to look at it from an appropriate distance and then blur our eyes in order to see it more clearly. Sounds mysterious at first.  He or she, I forget which, not that it matters, said that if we did this, we'd see the true essence of colour, shadow, line and form. And it is true. Just try it sometime. Looking at a Botticelli, a Rembrandt, a Gaugin or a Van Gogh with blurred eyes and we see the purpose of light and shadow, the colours working against one another and the relationship of  forms to each other. We can then better appreciate the things that possibly the artist is trying to accomplish. We remember that while he or she knows how to draw or paint a perfect rose, it may not be how the rose affects our senses, our concepts, our memories. Thus he or she does it to include these matters. Some artists, the bane of realism folk, do the job for us and blur charmingly like Degas, who may have been partly blind anyway but painted because he loved what he saw. What matters is how we feel about what we see and not the techniques or sets of rules for looking at it.  That's what we have to trust. It's the same in life. Often we become so enamored of a moment or image or action that we forget there is such a thing as the absolute temporary nature of things. Everything comes and goes: people, objects, even rock. All have a "lifetime" that will end in its present form and while matter cannot be entirely destroyed, it does change. What happens as we age and everything that everyone does, seems terribly important at the time, but in hindsight, it is all rather ridiculously temporal. We fret over things that somehow turn out the way they should or if they don't, they were bound to end up done somehow, even if not in our favour. When something dreadful and sudden occurs, we are shocked; in hindsight, it may have changed us but we found a way to survive and come out stronger or, alas,  in some cases,  weaker, but we all learned something from it. Perhaps doing a "blur" when we become too focussed on matters that may not matter, it might help to make everything much clearer.