A Normal Life

Irving Stone wrote a novel based on the life and struggles of Vincent Van Gogh. It's interesting to reflect on the fact that a man who's paintings hang on some of the most coveted wall space on planet earth only ever sold one of them during his lifetime (and not for very much). He was almost universally rejected as an artist. He died of a self inflicted gun shot wound in his mid thirties while broke, broken and ignored.

Van Gogh's life makes the process of creating look thankless, lonely and uncertain. Definitely not the glorious road some of us have painted in our minds. In the midst of that journey, one man says to Vincent, "Normal men don't create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that's why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time."

After the fact, we (the rest of the world) see revolutionaries in quite a different light than we do during the process of revolutiontion itself. They didn't do it for applause, and seldom (if ever) got it. They did it because something more important captured their imagination and they pursued it at whatever cost. That challenges me to consider the reasons why I do what I do. It challenges me to change the way I look at the potential Van Gogh's of our time.