It's About Time!

It’s about time is what I heard in my mind before I signed the wall renter agreement. I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew it would ultimately happen.

I knew it in the way you know a person is wrong for you before the first date is even over, and you do it anyway, because you already told yourself a story of hope and possibly how it would be.

I have owned businesses for forty years. I know what it takes to run one. I know the difference between people who are building something and people who just want a space to hang things in. I walked into that gallery already knowing which one I was dealing with. I hesitated for months about it and did it anyway.

In the beginning I had ideas. A lot of them. They landed on nothing. Not resistance, not disagreement — just silence and to be honest I was shocked. No ambition to build anything more than what already existed. Me being the relentless romantic, I kept offering and it kept going nowhere.

Have you ever kept showing up to something you already knew what the answer would be?

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They have not paid me since February. It is August. Last week I was told there would be a partial payment, except my check was sitting on a counter and nobody could find my mailing address. Really? Because it is on the contract I signed at the start of the year. I do not know what to do with an excuse like that except let it confirm what I already know.

This gallery offered two avenues that I entertained… member or wall renter. I really wanted to be a part of an art experience and upon initial conversations they acted interested. In May I become a wall renter, to simplify, to just focus on the art and not the frustration with being a go getter in a dead busess. But when you know things, actual knowing, not guessing, it does not let you rest inside the wrong container. It just waits for you to catch up to it.

So yesterday I said it out loud. That I was leaving. And something moved through me that I was not expecting. Not sadness. Not even anger, really, though the anger and frustration have been there for months.

Relief. The kind that arrives already familiar, because some part of me has been feeling it since I first walked through that door.

It felt my entire body relaxed and I again heard my intuition say, It’s about time.

I do not know yet what comes through the door that just opened. I only know it is opening, and I would rather stand in that not-knowing than keep performing certainty inside a room that was never going to change.

Have you ever known something was wrong long before you let yourself act on it? I have done this so many times and I continue to ask myself, WHY? Sometimes I think I do these things just to fill my boredom.

Wild Poppies Encaustic Art by Angela Blaha. For more art visit www.angelablaha.com