The Moments in Between

The Moments in Between
Looking back over my art, I realize I focus on moments a lot.
Whether it's music, writing, or painting, I keep coming back to them. A captured moment. A forgotten moment. A good moment. A painful one. And maybe most importantly, all those moments in between.
For as long as I can remember, I've said that the greatest gift you can ever give another person is your time.
Money- you can make more of it.
Things- you can replace them.
But time?
That's all there is.
Once you give someone your time, you have given them something you can never get back. So respect it. Appreciate it. Understand what it means when someone chooses to give some of theirs to you.
And maybe that's why I think so much about the moments in between.
We tend to measure our lives by milestones. Marriage. Children. Careers. Success. Loss. Death. The big things become milestone markers along our timeline, and we use them to divide our lives into before this happened and after this happened.
But those milestones actually make up a very small percentage of our lives.
Most of life happens in between them.
There's that old saying, it's not the destination, it's the journey. It's been said so many times that it's easy to dismiss as a cliché.
But it's true.
We become so focused on reaching the next goal that we can forget to experience everything happening while we're getting there.
As an artist, there is always another destination. Finish the painting. Get into the exhibition. Make the sale. Win the award. Create the next piece.
As a writer, I've discovered it's much the same. Finish the chapter. Finish the book. Publish it. Sell it. Get the review. Write another one.
And yes, the journey toward those things can be a hell of a lot of work.
But strangely enough, when you look backward, sometimes the journey becomes the strongest memory.
I think that's something I've been trying to share through my work for years, whether I realized it or not.
And it's certainly at the heart of The Canvas We Share.
From Chapter One, there is a milestone waiting for Daniel, Claire, Marcus, and Julian: the gallery exhibition.
It's out there on the horizon.
Something they're moving toward.
Something that feels important.
But just like the milestones in our own lives, the exhibition represents only a small percentage of their story.
The exhibition isn't really the story. Getting there is.
It's the conversations. The friendships. The mistakes. The ordinary days. The things said and left unsaid. It's love, loss, hope, pain, laughter, disappointment, and everything else that happens while they're busy moving toward that date on the calendar.
That's where they really live.
And so do we.
Maybe that's why I paint the way I paint and write the way I write. I'm trying to capture something that doesn't necessarily have a name or a date attached to it. A feeling. A memory. A piece of time that might otherwise disappear.
Because someday, when we look backward, the moments we thought were insignificant may turn out to be the ones we remember most.
So take your moments as they come.
Pay attention to them.
Give your time to the people who matter and appreciate the people who give theirs to you.
Dance in the rain.
Stay a little longer.
Don't spend your entire life waiting for the next milestone.
Because the milestones may help us measure a life.
But the moments in between are where we actually live it.
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