The Texas spring arrives not like a whisper but a symphony — a crescendo of scents and colors that assault your senses with joyful abandon. Bluebonnets stretch across fields like nature’s own Impressionist canvas, their sweet honey-vanilla fragrance carried on breezes that rustle through new grass. Stand among them and close your eyes: Hear the drone of industrious bees, the distant lowing of cattle, the soft percussion of petals brushing against each other in the wind. Open your eyes and witness the miracle — blue so intense it borders on supernatural, the scene kissed by morning dew that transforms ordinary fields into galaxies of sparkle. Touch a petal and marvel at its velvet strength, simultaneously delicate and resilient, like all the best things in life. This is Texas in the spring — not just a sight, but an immersion, a baptism in sensory wonder.

Tradition, Texas Style

I love tradition with the fervor of someone who’s collected far too many vinyl records and still writes thank you notes by hand. One tradition I’ve adopted since moving to Texas about 15 years ago is the annual bluebonnet painting pilgrimage — a ritual as sacred to Texas artists as barbecue is to the state’s collective waistline. If I’m lucky, these floral celebrities last a couple of weekends before fading away like one-hit wonder bands from the ’80s. There’s no predicting where to find them; Mother Nature is notoriously bad at returning texts about her planting schedule. Though I have my favorite spots, some years they don’t appear there at all, while other years they fill fields like someone spilled the world’s largest bucket of blue paint, then walked innocently away from the scene, whistling.

Kidnapping a Friend

This year, I indoctrinated — I mean, warmly introduced — one of my friends who recently moved to Texas into our state-flower painting obsession. The poor soul had no idea what he was in for when I kidnapped him at dawn for what I called a “quick painting excursion.” Six hours and 147 miles of back roads later, I’d shown him all my favorite spots, driving past rickety windmills that creak philosophical musings to the cattle, crumbling barns with rusty tin roofs that somehow still keep out rain through sheer Texan stubbornness, and old tractors that stopped working sometime during the Carter administration but remain standing as monuments to rural stoicism.

Once we found the perfect spot — after I rejected 17 “almost perfect but the light is 0.3% wrong” locations — we set up by a river, looking down upon a scene so picturesque it made my cynical heart grow three sizes. We immortalized it in paint, each brushstroke a tiny rebellion against time’s relentless march. I never sell my bluebonnet paintings because they are too valuable to sell, like trying to put a price tag on laughter or the perfect sunset. They spark memories of years past, painting with friends — some who are still around to compare brushstrokes, others who now paint celestial landscapes in whatever comes after this life. These canvases are my personal time machines, worth more than any figure an auctioneer could imagine.

Capturing Memories

Building memories is such a gift — a gift we often squander in our rush to document rather than experience. I feel profound sympathy for those who lose their memory, not just because of the medical tragedy, but because I get such rich gratification thinking about my past. It’s like having a private theater in my mind where I can replay the director’s cut of my life, complete with behind-the-scenes commentary.

This week I spent a lot of time in my studio, which is my version of a man cave, except instead of sports memorabilia and a mini-fridge full of beer it’s packed wall-to-wall with paintings that chronicle my existence better than any diary could. Photos don’t give me the same effect — they’re too instantaneous, too factual, too literal. They capture a millisecond without context, like reading only the punchline of a joke.

Painting, however — now that’s where the magic happens. Probably because when painting, I stand in one place, not just observing but interpreting the scenery or the people, taking signals received through my eyes (already an interpretation of wavelengths of light, if we want to get philosophical about it), processing them through the unique filter of my consciousness, sending signals down my arms, orchestrating a complex dance of muscles, tendons, and nerves to move my hands to wield my brush. It’s less documentation and more translation — reality filtered through the imperfect but beautiful sieve of human perception.

There is something transcendent about standing in a place, staring at it for two or three hours. When I look at these paintings later, the entire experience floods back — the sights, sounds, and special moments, like a deer leaping across the scene with balletic grace, or curious strangers approaching me and chatting about their own artistic aspirations or their uncle who “also paints, you two should talk.” These experiences are permanently embedded in the canvas through some alchemy of memory, pigment, and time that science has yet to adequately explain. Paintings don’t just capture light — they capture time, emotion, and the peculiar magic of being conscious and alive in a particular moment.

Big Time Memory Making 

I feel as though my life has been rich, especially these last years since I’ve made a deliberate effort to create memories — the kind that appreciate in value, unlike that questionable timeshare investment I made in 1985 and can’t get out of. In spite of the hassles involved in creating most of them (the flat tires on remote roads, the sunburns in uncomfortable places, the mosquito bites in even more uncomfortable places, the endless flights stuck in coach with a screaming baby), the memories are rich rewards that no tax authority can touch.

This intentionality is the secret — not passively waiting for special moments to happen while scrolling through other people’s curated lives on social media, but actively making them happen through conscious decisions and sometimes-uncomfortable effort. The best memories often lie just beyond the boundary of your comfort zone, in that territory marked “Here Be Dragons” on the map of your life — except the dragons usually turn out to be friendly, if somewhat prone to singeing your eyebrows.

The philosopher Seneca observed, “Life is long, if you know how to use it.” Most of us complain about not having enough time while simultaneously binge-watching entire seasons of shows we don’t even particularly enjoy. The paradox of modern existence is that we have more free time than any humans in history, yet feel more time-starved than ever. Perhaps the answer lies not in having more time, but in living more fully in the time we have — in choosing experiences over possessions, creation over consumption, and presence over distraction.

Frozen by Fear 

Last week in one of my coaching groups, a woman told me she wanted to come to the Plein Air Convention and then visit family, but, living in Canada, she feared the possibility of arrest if she did not have her papers with her. The news media was circulating fear with the enthusiasm of a toddler distributing cookie crumbs on a freshly vacuumed carpet. This fear narrative impacted her so much, it made her decide not to come. After I outlined that one of my friends in Canada had visited three times in the last four months, without any such hassle or fear — and in fact, the only danger he faced was excessive politeness and an addiction to maple syrup and buffalo check shirts — I convinced her to give it a shot.

Though the world is filled with wonder as technology changes at a pace that would make our grandparents suspect witchcraft, it’s also filled with narratives that social media algorithms have fine-tuned to promote fear or anger — emotions that keep us scrolling, clicking, and consuming content like digital addicts. Maybe I should not have said this, but I said, “Don’t let the fear mongers win. They’re selling you a product you don’t need to buy. Don’t assume what you’re being told is true without verifying it yourself. And if there is actual doubt, do your homework and find out the truth.”

Anxiety has been called “the dizziness of freedom” — that feeling we get when facing the boundless possibilities of choice. But what if our greatest anxiety should be not about what might happen if we venture into the unknown, but what will certainly happen if we don’t? The slow atrophy of possibility, the gradual narrowing of experience, until our lives become as small as our fears are large.

The Lie of Danger

Recently I was invited to travel to China, and I asked one of my friends if they wanted to come along. The response I received was, “It’s not safe, the food isn’t clean, and it’s dangerous for Americans.” Having done my homework and talked with numerous people who have actually been there — radical concept, I know — I said, “That’s simply not true; it’s a media-driven lie. Why let fear stop you from experiencing one of the oldest civilizations on Earth?”

How many extraordinary experiences have we all missed because of stories we’ve been told — or worse, stories we tell ourselves? The most dangerous place in the world is inside the prison of unfounded fears, where the walls are built of headlines designed to terrify rather than inform, reinforced by our own reluctance to question narratives that confirm our biases. Mark Twain supposedly said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” though I suspect if he were alive today, he’d add, “but only if you actually go, rather than reading terrifying clickbait about why you shouldn’t.”

When offered a chance to fly on an international trip, one of my kids actually said, “No, thanks, I can see it on Instagram.” I’m sorry, I love Instagram, but you can’t experience life through the photos of others. 

Digging for Courage

Where is fear stopping you? Not just the obvious fears — spiders, public speaking, that weird noise your refrigerator makes at 3 a.m. — but the subtle ones that whisper rather than shout?

What stories are you telling yourself that may not actually be true? How many of your limitations are self-imposed sentences beginning with “I can’t” or “I shouldn’t” or “People like me don’t”?

What evidence do you actually have for these limitations? Would it stand up in the court of rational inquiry, or would it be dismissed as hearsay and conjecture?

How many of your perceived boundaries are just that — perceptions? Imaginary lines drawn in imaginary sand?

What adventures await just beyond the artificial horizon of your comfort zone?

My goal is to see as much of the world as possible, even the toughest parts and the most difficult trips, because my feet still hold me upright and my brain still functions well enough to navigate Google Maps (mostly). If that ever changes and those opportunities are no longer possible, I don’t want to have regrets heavier than the souvenirs I never bought, memories more bitter than the foreign foods I never tasted.

The Simplicity of Living Fully

The intent of life is to live. Not to observe from a safe distance, not to hesitate until conditions are perfect, not to wait for better circumstances or more appropriate timing or the planets to align. To live — fully, immediately, and without the need for a user manual or five-star reviews.

As Thoreau put it more eloquently than I could: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Replace “woods” with whatever calls to your soul — mountains, cities, oceans, or yes, fields of bluebonnets — and you have a philosophy worth painting.

What can you do to enrich your time on earth? Not just pass the hours, but actually enrich them, like adding texture to a canvas or depth to a painting?

How much are you telling yourself all the reasons you can’t do things? And what if, just for a day, you decided those reasons were simply stories you’ve been telling yourself for so long you mistook them for reality?

What extraordinary experience is waiting for you just beyond your excuses? What masterpiece remains unpainted because your brushes stay dry?

Be intentional. Be bold. Don’t ever give up or give in. Life is short, but it’s wide enough to contain whatever adventures you’re brave enough to pursue. And if you’re very lucky, those adventures might include standing in a field of Texas bluebonnets, paintbrush in hand, capturing not just a landscape, but a moment in time that will never come again in exactly the same way.

Eric Rhoads