Be The Square

Every finished artwork leaves behind a quiet stillness—the moment when creation ends and the work begins to exist on its own. The final brushstroke is made, a signature or initials are transcribed onto the canvas and the brush is set down one final time. Deep breath in, deep breath out—the canvas breathes on its own, and the artist takes their first steps back into the real world, one that feels both familiar, yet strangely altered. As if it is in fact the same world, just now seen through a different lens. A lens that somehow allows you to see more of the world while seeing exactly the same amount. A lens that makes you notice things you wouldn’t have before—the weight of light, the rhythm of movement, the quiet spaces between sounds. It’s a subtle shift, but one that changes everything.

What lingers after the brush is set down that one last time is not only the finished image, but the story of its making—the hesitations, the revisions, the moments of surrender that shaped it. Creation in this sense, is never confined to the studio. It spills outward, into the way we move through the world, into how we perceive the forces that surround us. To create is to learn how to dwell inside uncertainty, to make a home in the space where nothing is fixed. The artist discovers this lesson in the dialogue with their work, but it’s a lesson that extends far beyond painting—life itself is composed of eternally shifting elements—some accidental, some deliberate, many beyond our control. We are asked, again and again, to find balance in the midst of turbulence, to hold our ground when the ground itself seems to move.

This is where the idea of the square emerges. Not in the traditional “don’t be a square” sense, but as a symbol of freedom, enlightenment, and of thinking outside the box. It’s the shape that endures, the one that keeps asking questions instead of settling for easy answers. The figure that somehow stays upright even when everything else feels like it’s tipping or spinning out of control. It moves with what’s happening around it, notices the shifts and sways, and somehow makes space to breathe in the chaos. To “be the square” mean fostering a calm presence amid constant change—creating a quiet unmoving center without denying the motion swirling around it. The square is an idea that can’t be pinned down or put into a narrow box, and it’s not rigid or stiff like the word might make it sound. It isn’t a fight against change; it’s about anchoring oneself within its flow—a rebellion born of equilibrium rather than obstinacy. Being the square means holding fast without turning brittle, staying receptive while preserving one’s shape.

There's another layer to this concept—one that speaks of another world where the square represents something more than just a shape: a perspective, a way of seeing. In that world, the square begins to glimpse beyond its edges, sensing other worlds that can't be sensed. Our own world is full of noise, distortion, and endless movement—be the one who holds your shape within it. Be the square who remains steady enough to perceive depth where others just see surface. It’s something that can only be learned through practice: by facing the blank canvas and enduring the silence. By making the first mark without certainty of where it will lead. And in the same way, we are invited to take our place within the wider storm of our existence—not to master it, not to map it, but to remain within it, steady and awake.

Now, with that in mind, after reading the next couple of paragraphs, I want you to close your eyes. Picture yourself standing in the middle of a storm. I want you to form an image of yourself, looking at yourself from outside yourself. The wind is howling, the space around you is in constant motion, the rain lashes at you from every direction, every second a raindrop slams against your skin, every millisecond the wind rushes up against you. All around you, everything is shifting—turbulent and alive. Now try, for a moment, to follow an individual raindrop; the cloud it formed in, the space within that cloud that it formed from, the space in the atmosphere that the cloud moved through in the second that the raindrop formed.

Think of the tumbling route that exact raindrop took as it hurtled through the sky, the precise moment it collided with another droplet, the split-second decisions made by the air currents that hit it and twisted its path. And think of every single one of those things happening in sequence in order for the raindrop to hit your skin, right at that second that you were standing there. Now think of all the raindrops—both the ones hitting your skin and the ones hurtling past you—moving from their creator in the clouds through the unseen currents of air, merging, parting, and carrying off by chance. Try to picture every square inch of air as it moved through the storm before splattering against your body’s surface—countless atoms exchanging places, each movement birthing another.

Now try to map it. Try to pin down every gust of wind, every eddy, every invisible corridor of pressure and lift. Try to capture this storm in its entirety—not just a snapshot, but the full, living choreography. No matter how hard you try, the fact is, you can’t. No one can. No one can comprehend such a thing. Not even the most advanced computer, not even the most powerful neural net running at unfathomable speeds, because the problem isn’t just complexity—it’s perception itself. It’s access. It’s limitations. We can’t trace every gust of wind or track the precise arc of every droplet simply because we can’t see it all. To do so, we would need a vantage point that doesn’t exist inside the system. We’d need eyes in every corner of the sky, sensors in every cubic centimeter of air, and even then, that data would need to be processed in real-time, simultaneously, with no margin of delay. We'd need so many instruments, so much machinery, that the storm itself would collapse under our scrutiny. But even if we could somehow collect all that information without disturbing the system we're trying to observe, we would still face a second, more fundamental limitation: the ability to comprehend it.

To comprehend and map a storm of such unpredictable magnitude isn’t simply about measurement, but about interpretation. Our brains, confined to a mere three-dimensional existence, are fundamentally incapable of perceiving the totality of such an event as it unfolds. In order to fully understand a storm in that way, we would need to model it not just spatially, but temporally, constructing a four-dimensional framework that captures its ever-evolving nature. This task requires more than just raw data, storage, or computational speed—it needs to detect and analyse information in real time, as the storm shifts and mutates. It would need to think across multiple dimensions simultaneously—through time, space, and possibility—while navigating feedback loops, randomness, and patterns so subtle they verge on the imperceptible. The storm speaks in a shifting language of pressure, temperature, and motion, where a butterfly-wing's worth of change can send ripples across the entire system.

The limit of pure knowledge stands at this point because we’re not all seeing beings. This is not a failure of intelligence but an understanding of scale. A realisation that some things are too complex, too fluid, too entangled to be captured in full. This is because you are limited by the dimensions you inhabit, not because you lack imagination. The understanding of such infinite and dynamic complexity requires us to transcend our current state of existence. Such a feat becomes achievable in a world that extends beyond three dimensions. Yet we cannot become four-dimensional beings because our nature remains limited to three. And yet, somehow, we know the storm. We move through it, feel it, respond to it. Not with a blueprint, but with a kind of instinctual sense. A kind of moment-to-moment improvisation. Instead of trying to conquer the chaos—to pin it down, chart it, or claim it—maybe the real task is to learn how to move with it. To notice patterns as they appear, to catch the rhythm in its pulse, to act with awareness rather than control.