A good day

Detail from Wedding at Cana by Duccio di Buoninsegna, painted in oil on wood between 1308-1311 (Wiki Commons)

Today has been a good day.

A friend and I have just about completed the book we've been working on; it probably ships to the printer tomorrow.

I tinkered ONE LAST TIME with a watercolour commission and actually packed it up and sent it to the buyer. Simon took some good photos of it.

The Chieftains' Timpan Reel is playing on YouTube. My belly is full of strong coffee and mini mince pies (2).

The dog is asleep at my feet, and the cat is curled up on our bed.

I submitted my bio for an art show in Exeter that goes up next Sunday.

What could be wrong?

Nothing.

No, wait. That can't be. I'm an artist and writer. Something MUST be wrong. If nothing is wrong, then something is wrong.

So this is what I want to know: How could I chide my mother for her constant search for some physical ailment until, at last, she found one and it killed her? I do the same thing but not with my health, just with THE REST OF MY FREAKING LIFE.

Uh oh. Did I just identify something important? Something other artistic types--overly sensitive, prone to looking for the fly in the ointment, prone to both perfectionising and awfulising--are prone to do?

Well then. If there's any truth in the phrase seek and ye shall find, it would pay to cease and desist with the quest for what's wrong. My poor, dear mother died a thousand times worrying about what she might die of until, at last, she had a terminal illness. Which, I must say, she faced as courageously as I've ever seen anyone face anything, seemingly completely at odds with her worry-wart proclivities. She is, actually my hero.

My poor mother was brave, having achieved the certainty she sought.

So what then for us worry-wart artist types? Do we wait to relax into a fulfilling life when there's no more life to have? Worrying, that. I'd rather be happy for a long time than brave for a short time.

I think, then, it's time for us artistic types to embrace wholeheartedly a new (well, quite old) mandate:

"A man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 8:15)

N.B. Ecclesiastes is the Old Testament, before all the good stuff got mixed up with the misreadings of the stuff in the New Testament who tried to make the Hippy from Nazareth into the Corporation Man.

A little revelry, then, bunkies: I think our art serves no one if it doesn't serve us well. And, as Woody Allen once said, "Man lives to eat and often there must be a beverage as well."

Make mine a martini!