I wrote about aligning what you really want with your actions in this post. If you have not read it, here is a capsule version. If what you think you want and what you do are not in alignment, one or the other needs to change.

For many of us change is easier said than done. We want to change; we want our secret desires to be our public desires, but something holds us back from making this change. We plod along with our secret desires hidden where only we can see them. Our public desires remain something we can live with, but not always what we really want.

It should be a simple matter to make our private desires public, and let our public desires go. We don’t really care about some of our public desires anyway, they are the expectations of others upon us. It really should be quite easy to walk by a trash can and drop our public desires in, and walk on.

Yet we do not. Why can’t we just drop our public desires and start living the life we really want? No matter what reasons we think we have for not allowing ourselves to be who we want to be, all reasons are rooted in one common place.

We fear…. We fear what our parents will say. We fear what other family members or friends will say. We fear what the world will think of us. We fear what will happen if we start to change. We fear that allowing ourselves to change will somehow make us different, and we do not want to be too different. We want to be the real us, but we would rather no one noticed, so we stay the same.

What happens when we allow this fear of change to run our lives? Well for starters we are miserable. We are unhappy because we know we are living a partial lie. We want to change and quit living in a lie, but we do not change. We would rather be miserable as we are than change and become who we really are.

The great artists of the middle ages painted some beautiful work in their day. These same artists also created some less than okay paintings. Where did all the less than okay paintings go? Artists who paint discovered a wonderful secret that we can all use in our life.

In days past, canvas for painting was very expensive. One did not simply throw a bad painting away. Great and not so great artists of the past did one of two things. They either modified a bad painting into something they were satisfied with, or they painted it over completely and started fresh.

Artists in general do not worry about failure. Failure is creation too, and a learning process. Every artist knows every painting is not going to be a masterpiece. Great artists use this secret to recreate on the very same canvas something better than what they had created in the first place. In essence they reinvented what was on the canvas.

We are all artists in our own way. We are our own canvas. We are the creators of our own painting. It is the only painting we have of ourselves, and most of us do not like what we have created. We have the freedom to repaint it as often as we wish, and there is no time like the present. We are the only person who needs to approve of our painting. If we approve of what we have created, others will approve of us too.

Unleash the artist in yourself, and recreate who you really are. Cleaning the canvas of us, or modifying what is already there is what we need to be doing to improve our lives. If your first attempt is not a success, that is okay. Because we are our own canvas, we can paint over our mistakes as many times as we need to in the process of getting us right.