Paint
This is Simon. Simon is a student at Canvas who spent most of his weekend scraping paint off of old brick walls. We’ve been doing a lot of this recently. I’ve actually tricked myself into having a good attitude about it by imagining that I’m some great artist working on something beautiful. You don’t mind being covered in paint chips as much when you go to the world of make believe and say that you’re following in the footsteps of Michelangelo.
The cool thing about it is that I really do love the scraping. It takes hours to forever to make any progress at all and you can’t see how far you’ve come until you take a step back, a deep breath, and see the entire work. Then you realize that you’re getting somewhere. There’s probably a metaphor in all of this somewhere.
It’s even better to imagine that this scraping away at paint; this tediousness with a little tool and persistence, is part of a larger process of turning an old warehouse into a place that students really will come to love as their home away from home. It will be the place that some students will literally experience love for the first time in their lives, where they will feel part of community in a way that they have never thought was possible. In light of that, paint scraping sounds pretty good.
