Yesterday, I painted. Mostly on the wall, some on the floor and some on me. I usually love painting, but yesterday’s paint job was excruciating.

The walls that I painted are to be our bedroom walls. This part and the rest of the house was sort of a garage/church/storeroom and even at one point my hair salon. This will be the temporary space until we build the actual house. It is quite big for a temporary space.

Let me speak about the walls of the ‘bedroom’. They are not the straightest, they have old paint that wants to come off, there are cement pieces that stand out due to the plaster job, there are small holes in from previous screws, there is artwork that I painted while it was my hair salon, and there is still grey, unpainted cement… and let me not speak about the dust and spider webs.

Needless to say, the walls had to be cleaned. I had to wash it with soapy water, but did I? No, I brushed it with a broom to get most of the dust and webs off. I was supposed to scrape the old lifting paint off, but did I? No, I only scraped some of it that was really bad. I was supposed to fill the holes and even out the cement and so much more, but do you think I did that? You guessed correctly. No. Which is why, three coats of paint is needed.

Let me remind you, I love painting. However, these walls were terrible. I have painted walls with some issues, but not this many, and it frustrated me. The frustration caused me to slack on important things. Oh, I forgot to say that two sections of the walls have some cracks in them too. While painting, I realised that if the walls have a problem, the preparation will be terrible, and if the preparation is terrible, then the painting will be terrible too. Fortunately, this room is only temporary and will be thrown down again soon.

Sometimes, we want to fix the problem that surfaces, the problem we want to solve that makes the room ‘look’ better. When we begin to solve that problem, we realise that there is more to the problem than meets the eye, and that the problem is only the tip of the iceberg. Once we begin to dig into the issue, we see that painting over our problems begin to show the roots of the problems. We begin to see the cracked and skew walls, we see the dust and cobwebs, the uneven, grey cemented walls, we see the paint lifting and the holes that need to be filled. When we see all this, then we prefer giving a blind eye, because it is just too much work to fix the walls the way they should, because we only want to fix the surfaced problem now!

We want to fix the problems in the bedroom with porn, an affair, less or more sex, when the root of the problem is proper communication about our sexual needs and wants. We want to fix the money issues with finding a rich partner, stealing or selling loose things, when the root of the problem is take-aways, unnecessary driving, nice times and living above your means or salary. We want to fix our self-esteem with make-up, diets and compliments from others, when the root of the problem is learning how to love yourself for who you are.

Painting over our ugly walls will not always fix the problem. It sometimes disguises the problem, but later, it will show, and you might not even see it yourself; others will.

Do yourself the favour of identifying an issue in your life, and digging deep to find what is beneath the surface. Then smoothen, wash and fill your walls before painting all over it.