Renoir's last words and our relationship to time

Counter cultural wisdom for a society that worships timelines, answers and youthful achievement

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French painter that was influential in the impressionist era alongside Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and others - by all accounts, one of the greats. He lived to 78 and the last word he spoke was simply “flowers” as he looked from his deathbed to a bouquet of flowers across the room.

In his final days he also commented on his relationship with painting: “I think I'm beginning to learn something about it”.

There is something gripping about the admittance that despite a prolific career and long life that this artist believed he was just starting to get somewhere. There are many lessons to consider:

• Among the most challenging parts of being human is the fact that life is still unfolding - we can’t see the whole picture from individual moments in time

• Our culture over glorifies youthful achievement and pushes narratives around timelines - it may benefit us to consider that perhaps the human lifespan is ~80+ years because life takes a long time

• That among our greatest spiritual pitfalls is confusing the starting line with the finish line. that despite how much progress we make, we will always just be getting started

I recently read Gene Wilder’s book Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art which proved to be incredibly profound and honest - he speaks about his relationship to acting and love. He is open about the events that lead to the beginning and end of each of his four marriages, commenting that he only began to understand love late in his life and how this understanding of love changed his lifelong need for validation:

“What I didn’t know was that I don’t need to act. I might want to act—just for the love of acting—but not because I need to earn the right to feel loved by God. I’ve got something much better. . . . I feel loved by the person I love.”

The idea that a life takes a lifetime is encouraging to me, and I hope it is to you. It is a nudge to consider that maybe life is much more simple than we try to make it. That at some point in the future we may look upon our open questions and struggles with a renewed perspective and find meaning in things that were challenging, confusing or unresolved.

The questions around whether our perspectives will shift over time and life’s simplicity remind me of words from the great spiritual teacher Ram Dass: “I was no longer needing to be special, because I was no longer so caught in my puny separateness that had to keep proving I was something. I was part of the universe, like a tree is, or like grass is, or like water is. Like storms, like roses. I was just part of it all.”