Paint

We paint our walls to cover up the ugly colours underneath. We paint them to cover up the dirt and imperfections. We cannot replace them easily, so we paint to hide what we wish to replace. In the same way, I believe we paint the old walls which are ourselves.

The dirt we cover up is the filth built up from living in and using the room in our daily lives. It is only natural that we have that evidence of the life that has gone on there. However, we are told that we must always be perfectly clean.  We could clean the walls of course, but that would take much more time than we are willing to spend. So we cover it with a fresh new coat of paint. But the dirt is still there and more dirt will build up on top of the new paint.

Sometimes we wish we could tear down the walls entirely and start with new ones. We believe that change like that will change the entire makeup of the place in which we live. Not many of us have that luxury to rebuild however. Instead, we choose a new colour for the walls and pretend that they are entirely new. Of course, we know that is not the truth, but we tell ourselves to believe. We imagine that the old walls no longer exist.

The holes in the walls are the hardest to fix. We patch them up with something much weaker than than the material it started out with. The patch is made of something different, and will never be quite the same as everything around it. Society tells us that we must hide the fact that we had that hole to fix in the first place. So we paint over it. But the hole is still there. It simply hides beneath another layer of paint.