Back Story…

One lazy afternoon, watching TV with my 15 year old daughter, my eyes stray to the abandoned, unfinished painting on my easel; instinctively, I reach for the paint brush left on my side table since the morning. I grasp it in my hand and hold it tight without further thought, soon lost in the gripping narrative on the TV again.

Suddenly , the clicking sound of a camera startles me, my daughter is shooting away in the direction of my hands. She later shows me her labor of love, and I am intrigued and amazed by the choice of her subject; a few casual shots of my hand clasping the paint brush…

Long after that lazy afternoon, while casually flipping through the pictures on the camera again; I once again come across those very shots of my hand and I am amazed at the impact they have on me; these random photographs of my hand holding my paint brush suddenly strike me as metaphors for me taking a grip on my life, discovering and finding myself in a space where I had somehow got lost…In my hand the paint brush resembles a little scalpel or a digging tool aimed in my direction as if to suggest an excavation or an unearthing of the soul, that entity which often gets buried under the mundane. That image captured by my loving child is now etched in my heart- a reminder of my epiphany, which launched me into a determination to unravel and discover myself. At the same time, it serves as a powerful reminder of how much our children teach us, just when we think we have lost ourselves in raising them up, teaching and guiding them; there they are, repaying us by opening for us new horizons and giving us hope.

We teach our children to discover, to learn, to paint their goals on the bright new canvas that awaits them; in return they teach us to find new meaning in our own, as yet unfinished canvas of life, adding bright new colors and unexpected perspectives to our own designs.

Haafiza Sayed is a Muslima Ambassador. To see more by Haafiza Sayed, see her work in the Art Gallery