The Doer and the Observer
Sometimes I wonder if I am still chasing after sensationalism in whatever I do.
Perhaps it is the old habit of striving for success—trying too hard to achieve some perfect goal, some extraordinary outcome that will shake the world. Looking back, I sometimes recognize in myself what the Vedanta tradition describes as attachment to the doer: the identification with the one who must accomplish something.
Perhaps the answer is not in doing more, but in becoming more attentive to the deed itself—to the process, the movement, the journey.
It can feel like swimming upstream, like the salmon returning to its birthplace to spawn, driven by some mysterious force toward the very struggle that may eventually consume it.
And then, occasionally, I catch myself.
I stop.
Something softens.
I begin to feel that perhaps I don't have to force the river to take me anywhere. There is a different kind of movement available—a smoother flowing feeling that I have come to call contentment within.
It is not an escape from life. It is more like a meditative state of consciousness, where the mind becomes quiet enough for one to notice a subtle shift into something deeper. A kind of spiritual absorption.
Nothing extraordinary happens.
And yet, something happens.
Today I spent several hours at a Malay fisherman's jetty working on a huge canvas, roughly twenty feet by eight feet, which I had actually begun almost twenty years ago at the Museum Gallery at USM.
The painting itself had already taken an unusual journey.
I had created its background by transferring oil paint from the surface of water onto the canvas. It was not an easy process. With the help of my friend Rashid, we made a shallow pool using a large tarp to contain the water. I poured different colors of oil paint onto the surface and allowed them to move freely.
Then, very carefully, we laid the enormous canvas gently across the surface of the water.
The paint clung to the canvas.
When we lifted it, the colors had transferred themselves in flowing patterns—almost cosmic, like a view into outer space.
It came out better than I had expected.
Perhaps that was the first lesson.
I had not actually painted the "space."
I had created the conditions and then allowed the paint to do what paint does.
There was a certain intelligence in the process that did not belong entirely to me.
Later I decided that the vast field of colors needed a human presence.
And life, as it often does, provided the opportunity.
A friend's four-year-old daughter came along, and I had her place her painted palms all over the canvas, alongside my own.
Those little hands became part of the painting.
The child who was four years old then is now almost twenty and preparing to go to college.
Twenty years can pass in the blink of an eye.
Today, another eight-year-old girl sat nearby with my large sketchpad, happily doing her own drawings while I worked.
My little protégé.
And strangely enough, I found myself struggling.
I was second-guessing myself.
What had initially been allowed to flow freely had suddenly become a lesson in effort.
There was the doer.
And there was me, the observer, watching the doer at work.
That distinction has become increasingly interesting to me.
A musician knows this feeling. There comes a moment when the musician is no longer calculating every note. Something deeper takes over. The right note arrives at precisely the right moment.
An artist sometimes experiences the same thing.
You know when something is right.
Not because someone has measured it or declared it successful, but because the work itself seems to come into alignment with something within you.
Perhaps this is what I have been searching for all these years.
Not the perfect painting.
Not the extraordinary achievement.
Not something that will shake the world.
Perhaps simply that moment when the artist becomes quiet enough for the work to reveal itself.
The doer wants to take credit.
The observer simply watches.
And somewhere between the two, if I am fortunate, the painting begins to breathe.
Maybe that is the real journey.
Not swimming harder against the current, but learning when to stop fighting the river.
To do the work.
To give it everything I have.
And then, somehow, to let go of the one who thinks he is doing it.
Wallahu Alam.
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