A few years ago I had an accident. Chronic concussion. The kind that doesn’t go away.
I could have seen it as a catastrophe. For a while, I did.
Then I changed the lens.
This is something I learned in my years in business: when a threat arrives — a market shift, a political crisis, a diagnosis — the outcome isn’t determined by the threat itself. It’s determined by how you meet it. That sounds like a motivational poster. I know. But I’ve lived it, and it’s true.
The injury became a lane change. Back to what my heart had always beaten for: art.
Here’s what surprised me.
My brain — the one that now struggles to concentrate, that gets overwhelmed, that needs rest — completely disappears when I paint.
The neuroscience people call it flow. In personal development courses, we talked about it endlessly. But I understand it differently now, from the inside: it’s the state where you lose all sense of time and space. You just are. A kind of moving meditation, where the wound and the cure are somehow the same thing.
The brain that can’t focus… vanishes into the canvas.
Art didn’t change because of the injury. Life and growth develop you — not one event, not one diagnosis. But returning to art gave me something I hadn’t expected.
Balance. A way to understand my own feelings. And something harder to name.
When I paint, I feel alive. Fully, completely alive.
And I feel — somehow — immortal.
Because whatever happens to me. To my brain, to my body. My art remains. My thoughts remain. My feelings remain.
That’s not nothing. That’s everything.
Have you ever found your way back to something essential — through a detour you didn’t choose?
