The Fear of Adventure
“Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.” ― Danny Kaye
As far as adventure quotes go, this is not the most adventurous one. It’s on my list because I love the metaphor it holds within it.
Picture your life as a canvas. Really, close your eyes and imagine it as a big white rectangle, no marks, not spots, no lines just yet. Then, see yourself as you begin to grow and are molded and shaped through familial beliefs and patterns. Now as you see images begin to emerge, notice the color that you're painting with, is it just one color?
In the first week of my adventure, I find myself re-exploring my home-city. I am called back to those early times when my canvas was beginning to take shape. Each time I come back here I am reminded how much my own life painting has shifted and how many more colors have been added throughout the years. How many textures have been added, and how some of the rough edges from childhood wounds have been smoothed out through the healing process over time. Each of those edges remind me of how I was able to grow and expand in my sense of self beyond the limits of the original boundaries of my parents' generational beliefs. With each stroke of my brush, those beliefs and wounds have mixed with other colors to create just the right hue to represent my growth and healing.
As I drive around reacquainting myself with the neighborhoods, each turn leads me into a distant memory of a different time. A time when my sense of self was built on wobbly grounds of confusion about who I was as a person within my heritage and culture, with my family, extended family, community, and friends. All those relationships that created angst in me about how to act and who to be to fit the expectations of others. There I was, a Mexican-American girl growing up in a middle-class white neighborhood - knowing I didn’t fit the mold of what my heritage and culture expected me to be and knowing that I didn’t fully fit into the culture I was growing up in.
All I know is that when an opportunity came around for me to try another color beside the gray that I had been handed to me - I jumped on it! It’s been 30 plus years since I have lived in my home city, and as I spend time with my relatives that live here, I see their paintings are varying shades of gray, some have an additional one or two colors, but mostly they are gray. This is my understanding of what happens when you stay in the same place, doing what everybody's expecting you to do. Your painting begins to look like a million other pictures of varying shades of gray. Don’t get me wrong, they are my relatives and in some weird stroke of the brush they each have a spot in my own painting.
Over the years, it has been challenging to add other colors to my painting, or to change their colors in my painting. Many times my paintbrush would not accept another color no matter how many times I tried because the wound was deeper than I was prepared to go, but in the end as I learned to deepen how I feel, expand my capacity for love, open to the process of how to accept change with more ease, grace, and forgiveness than before, the colors would magically change on their own, and I wouldn’t have to force it. Allowing each brush stroke of experience to create a color all its own on my canvas of life.
As I prepare to leave and continue on my roadtrippin’ adventure, I am reminded of the importance of getting out of your comfort zone. So, whether you get adventurous in your own city or go off to other places; just go out! Get and create more colors to make the painting of your life as different and colorful as possible. Make each day a part of an adventure so that you can experience all the colors of life through some magical stroke of the brush. Make sure that in the end, you will be proud of your life’s masterpiece!