The World As It Is

 Sometimes when I walk, random phrases will drift into my brain, unbidden, and usually drift out again. I don't generally pay much attention, although sometimes I'll be struck by something that sounds good, but I usually forget it again. I guess it's day dreaming...  However, the phrase "the world as it is" keeps drifting into my head, so persistently that I wonder why. 

I think it comes (probably paraphrased) originally from a book of eastern philosophy called "Truth and Actuality", that my dad had next to his bed for years in the (incorrect) belief that he would eventually read it. The first pages talk about the world as we perceive it, verses the world as we believe it to be, verses the world as it actually is. The implication, as I understand it, being that we can't possibly know the world as it actually is, because we have to filter everything through our senses, and our beliefs. What, in fact, would the world as it actually 'is' even mean? 

Now that I know it's online, I should really read that book...

In the context of my day-dreaming, it seems to represent a sort of 'sigh' against life as we expect it to be. The "world as it is" is the world stripped of all our preconceptions of what it "should be". It's harsh, but also comforting - it's not trying to be anything... it just is. It is, I guess, a sort of emotional surrender, an acceptance for a moment of what is, verses what should be, an spiritual moment of relaxation.

I feel like I want to portray the world as it is in my art - beautiful, stripped of meaning, stripped of expectation. But what would doing so mean? Is that the exact wrong question to ask? It's clearly a fool's errand, but I think maybe (for me) art is about running fools errands, about trying with all your heart to do something that makes no sense, that cannot be done, and seeing what happens as a result.

Perhaps?