Watching Paint Dry: A Meditation on Acceptance

I absolutely despise painting.

Not in the way one dislikes brussels sprouts or airport security lines—this is a deeper, more primal aversion. It's the kind of hatred that comes from intimate knowledge, from having failed repeatedly at something that looks deceptively simple when professionals do it.

I admit I am not good at it.
Just like most other things in life.

But with painting, the incompetence is unusually visible. When you're bad at small talk, people forget in an hour. When you're bad at painting, the evidence lives on your walls for years, silently judging you every morning over coffee.

I do not have the patience to paint correctly.

There's a zen quality required—a willingness to accept that everything takes three coats, that edges exist to mock you, and that the color on the swatch bears no relationship whatsoever to the color that will eventually haunt your dining room. I lack this zen. I possess, instead, a fervent belief that shortcuts exist and that I, specifically, will discover them.

I have not discovered them.

So I hire this part out to the experts.

But here's where modern society truly lost the plot:

Choosing a paint color is ridiculous these days.

I walked into a paint store recently and was confronted with approximately four thousand shades of white. Not colors—just white. Each with its own aspirational name: "Alabaster," "Snowbound," "Pure White," "Decorator's White," "White Dove," "Simply White," "Chantilly Lace."

There was a white called "Westhighland White."
It's a dog breed.
We're naming paint colors after dog breeds now.

The employee cheerfully explained the undertones—warm whites, cool whites, whites with gray undertones, whites with beige undertones, whites with "greige" undertones, which is apparently a portmanteau we're all supposed to accept as legitimate.

I stood there, holding seventeen paint chips that looked identical, feeling the full weight of late capitalism pressing down on my shoulders. Someone, somewhere, decided that the world needed four thousand whites. Someone got paid to name them. Someone else is writing marketing copy about their "versatility" and "timeless appeal."

And here I am, a grown adult, paralyzed by abundance.

Did we not learn that the small crayon box was sufficient for everything?

There were eight colors. Maybe sixteen if your parents loved you. And those colors didn't lie to you with names like "Repose Gray" or "Accessible Beige." They were called Yellow. Blue. Red. Green. You knew what you were getting.

Burnt Sienna was the most exotic it got, and even then, we all suspected it was just brown having an identity crisis.

But now? Now we have "Revere Pewter" and "Edgecomb Gray" and "Balboa Mist." These aren't paint colors—they're characters from a period drama who inherit troubled estates and brood attractively in drawing rooms.

I miss simplicity.

I miss walking into a room and saying, "I'll take the blue one," without someone asking, "Which blue? We have seventy-three blues. Here's a book."

Eventually, you survive the paint store, make a choice you'll second-guess for months, and then comes the actual work.

Over the decades, I've employed many painters. Some have been magnificent—artists with brushes, moving through rooms like surgeons, leaving behind walls so perfect they seem computer-generated. These painters make you believe in human potential.

Others, I'm convinced, never learned to stay within the lines in kindergarten.

Perhaps they were the rebels, the ones who colored the entire page purple and called it "expression." This would be fine, admirable even, except now they're charging me by the hour to express themselves on my trim work.

There's an astonishing range in the painting profession. One painter will arrive with tarps, tape, primer, a methodical system, and the calm demeanor of someone who has made peace with gravity and surface tension. The next will show up with a gallon of paint, one brush, and the unshakable confidence of someone who's never met a consequence.

Both, somehow, call themselves professionals.

Watching painters do their craft is like ballet dancers performing Swan Lake.

I mean this sincerely, not sarcastically. Good painters have an economy of motion that's genuinely beautiful—the smooth stroke, the exact amount of paint on the brush, the way they somehow never drip, never splatter, never seem to think about what they're doing. It's automatic grace.

Their hands know things their brains don't need to supervise.

Meanwhile, when I paint, my brain is shouting constant instructions—don't drip, don't drip, DON'T DRIP—and my hands are just improvising wildly, operating on chaos theory and misplaced optimism.

Which brings me to the waiting.

Because once the painters leave—good or catastrophic—you're left alone with the consequences. And this is where you learn something important:

Watching paint dry isn't just a figure of speech.
It's a genuine activity.
A vigil.

There's actual value in it—evidence that you've done the thing, that the process is irreversible, that you're now committed to Agreeable Gray or Swiss Coffee or whatever aspirational lie you chose at the paint store.

I've spent entire afternoons watching paint dry, not out of boredom but necessity. If you don't watch it, you miss the moment when the sheen changes, when you can finally see whether you've made a terrible mistake or merely a regrettable one.

It's meditative, in the way that staring into the void is meditative.

But I've learned something from all this—from the good painters and the catastrophic ones, from watching paint dry and watching myself fail at applying it, from the tyranny of infinite color choices.

Perfection is a lie we tell ourselves to justify hiring professionals.

And that's okay.

Some people can paint within the lines. Some people can choose between Alabaster and Swiss Coffee without experiencing existential dread. Some people have the patience to tape everything properly and wait for coats to dry and somehow not get paint in their hair.

I am not those people.

But I can appreciate them from a distance, preferably while they're working in my house, while I'm safely in another room, not helping.

And maybe that's enough.

Maybe the real wisdom isn't learning to paint but learning to step aside for those who can—to recognize your limitations and hire accordingly, to accept that not every skill needs mastering, that sometimes the highest form of competence is knowing when to write the check.

The walls don't care who painted them.
They just care that someone did.

And as the last coat dries, I realize: maybe acceptance, too, takes three coats.