There was a painting that hung in my bathroom.

It was placed inoffensively between the toilet and the shower - a brief departure from the quotidian of the eggshell-white room. Against the tiled walls sat a simple scene: just a boy, alone, watching the sky.

The boy sits alongside a rowboat that has long been out of commission. With a stalk of hay hanging from his lips and his hands clasped behind his head, he surveys the beach before him. Monstrous clouds rolls above him - enormous, restless, and utterly unmenacing.

The shores of a gentle beach lap at the boy’s feet, but he does not worry about the wetness.

This is his place of peace, and mine too.

The broken rowboat is his place of solace, a symbol of disrepair that manages to make him feel so complete. His toes play with the pale sand that surrounds him. Look closely enough and you can smell the salt in the air and feel the wind play with your hair. The boy has found a place of refuge in the harmonious clash of land and sea.

Where has he come from? Where will he go?

We are all the boy - alone on the shore. The painting is a mirror that I gazed at often.

At the sands of infinity, it is all we can do to stare into the abyss of uncertainty and do nothing more than clasp our hands behind our head and welcome the waves of fortune that may roll our way. The painting is a suggestion of strength: our fortitude when faced with a world that laps at our toes.

Weather be damned: This is our shore.

The painting is all of our homes, whether we choose to live there or not. The painting is a towering monument to the greatness of man’s ability to understand his smallness and his enormity. The painting is a song sung to the brave souls who dare to wet their feet in the sea of life. The painting is life itself: our hopes and fears and wonders and selfishness and power!

But once I walked in on my grandpa pooping and now I can’t look at it.