Apparently I have bats

This week, I have nothing useful to tell you.

No really.

I haven't had a breakthrough in the studio. I haven't learned an important lesson about creativity. I haven't had one of those satisfying weeks where something goes wrong and, by Sunday, I've worked out what it was all for.

Actually, quite a lot has gone wrong, but I still don't know what any of it was for.

It's been one of those weeks where things seem to pile on top of each other.

A long and expensive process I've been dealing with for months suddenly came to a halt because two different authorities can't agree on who is responsible. The result is that everything we've done so far has been cancelled and we have to start again somewhere else.

And then there was a big life plan that I thought was completely settled. I’d spent months making decisions, putting things in place and mentally moving on, only to discover at almost the last minute that it wasn’t going to be quite as straightforward as I’d thought. So that too has stalled while I work out what happens next.

In the same week, the bat survey for my house renovation came back. I have bats. (Of course I do!) Which means delays, more expense and more complications.

There have been other things too. Difficult conversations. Unexpected emotional wobbles. And underneath all of that, I've been absolutely exhausted. In fact, there was one day when I barely moved from a chair in my living room. Occasionally I went to the bathroom or made a coffee, and then went straight back to the chair where I fell asleep again!

So it's been a week.

Normally, this is the point in the Sunday email where I tell you what I've learned from all this… but I haven't learned it yet.

I don't know whether everything is going to work out for the best. Maybe I'll look back in six months and realise that the delays were useful, or the changes were necessary, or that one thing had to fall apart, so something better could take its place.

Maybe I will. But right now, I'm just in the middle of it, with phone calls to make and emails to write and questions to ask, and absolutely no idea how it will all turn out.

At first I didn’t know what to write, but I've been thinking about how uncomfortable we are with being in the middle of things. We like resolution. We like stories with endings. Something bad happens, we struggle with it, and then we emerge with our three important lessons and a new appreciation for life.

But we all know that actual life isn't like that. And neither, now that I think about it, is painting.

When I'm making a painting, I spend a lot of time not knowing.

I don't know whether the thing I've just done has ruined it. I don't know what it needs next. I don't know whether the strange mark I've made is going to become the most important part of the painting or whether I'll obliterate it tomorrow.

Sometimes I leave the studio with absolutely no idea what to do next and over the years, I’ve learned to be OK with that. In fact, I embrace it.

I don't immediately demand an answer from the painting. I leave it alone, I go and do something else, and I come back the next day, and look again. I keep doing that until eventually something shifts and I see what I couldn't see before.

Perhaps life deserves the same courtesy. Maybe not everything needs to be understood while we're still in the middle of experiencing it.

Maybe some weeks are just messy and difficult and exhausting, and I don't have to immediately transform them into personal growth.

I think that's particularly important for me now. For a very long time, I spent a lot of my time teaching. My job was to make sense of things and explain those things to other people. But I'm not doing that anymore. I'm just an artist now and artists don't necessarily have to explain. I can treat life like I treat my paintings.

So that's where I am this Sunday morning. I don't know what the lesson is yet, and I’m going to resist the temptation to invent one.