Wrap-up: The Difference Between Nothing and Something

There’s this lovely brain space that opens up when you’re deep in a long project. It’s not quite obsession, not quite devotion, but a focused something in between. My mind rearranging itself around a task.

To be clear, I started painting in a bathroom. Easily trivial, forgettable. But it wasn’t! For weeks, these small, tiled, sometimes smelly echoey space shaped my days. I started each day with make in mind.

So much of life is shaped by things that appear to “not matter.” But then you make. You act. You participate. The difference between nothing and something is sometimes no more than a decision with some follow-through.

During the project I was also reading The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. She’s amazing, admirable and apparently always ahead of what’ comes next. In 1958, she spoke to the ironic simultaneity of two historical events: the discovery of the vastness of Earth’s space, and the growing realization of how small and connected our world was becoming. Expansion and contraction—happening at once.

She writes:

“The discoveries of the immensity of available space on earth coincided with the famous shrinkage of the world… it was not the ‘discovery’ of America but the simultaneous shrinking of the earth which made this new experience so decisive.”

We gain the world and lose ourselves. We move faster, stretch farther, and somehow become more isolated. She calls it “innerworldly alienation”—the sense of being disconnected even while surrounded. She reminds us that:

“The moment we no longer try to change the world, but are content to interpret it, we are no longer acting beings.”

I guess painting the mural was the opposite of that. It was an act. A choice. A commitment of time to something “unnecessary” that at the same time, very much matters.

The process was beautifully slow. Local. Embodied. It took up time I could’ve spent doing “more important” things. But instead of shrinking my world, it rooted me. It expanded my participation in this environment. Now that it’s finished, I just get to be a part of the space, the place, the environment in a long-lasting way. I left something behind that didn’t exist until I made it exist.

Intention begets presence. And maybe more than anything, I’m reminded of how much one person’s action still matters. It’s easy to forget. But as Arendt writes:

“The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness and unpredictability as the greatest.”

One person. One choice. One mural. One bathroom.