I read once on a beautiful piece of artwork, according to Amy Johnson, “You get to paint the future on a clean canvas.” While this is a lovely sentiment, it is not true.
One cannot believe for any length of time that the future is a blank canvas. To believe that is to turn a blind eye to the fact that the future is affected by a past already written by others. If one were to believe that every new day is a new canvas, blank and fresh, that person would likely be met with a series of disappointments, and be forced to face reality sooner or later. A person’s race, gender and abilities, among other variables, all affect the kind of canvas a person is given to paint their life upon.
The canvas is not blank at all, but piled high with layers of paint centuries dry: still slick tempura strokes of yesterday, acrylic laid down by grandmothers who stood outside the White House demanding the right to vote from President Wilson and winning it, but only for white women. Beneath that lies antiquity transcribed in oil paint, recounting the journey of white settlers across oceans and how they revised the map of the earth, how they wrote their names upon the land they found. We walk paths that were set in stone generations before we conceived the atom bomb, past petroglyphs of histories that fell to genocide. Buried deeper are the remains of vibrant pigments from ground petals, which stained the historical canvas of time back when history was only a collection of stories told by mouth, and deeper still lies the vast masterpiece of landscape and layers of fossils upon which we all carry our weight from one location to the next.
To think that one is painting on a clean canvas is foolish; it is to ignore the universe in all of its vast historic worth, from its most grisly atrocities to its most honest moments of creation.
Yet, this is not to discourage those who wish to design Earth’s next vignette, but those who hope to succeed in their endeavors must be ready to build upon an already ancient earth and into an even more ancient, yet still expanding universe.
I feel, still, that I must give Amy Johnson some credit. Her quote was meant to inspire self-forgiveness and had more to do with letting go of painful memories and not letting the past tarnish one’s future than the “history is irrelevant” interpretation I imposed on it. Her point is that people have the power to take control of their lives and make them into something they want, and I agree with that. In its intended context, Johnson’s advice is solid. I simply wished to impress that, as important as it is to be able to forgive oneself, forgive others and move on, it is at least as important to be able to learn from one's mistakes and from history, take responsibility for one's actions and make amends.
