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Still Life with Ginger Pot II, 1911–12, Piet Mondrian
To know what matters and what does not is the lesson that we long to be taught. Mondrian’s Still Life with Ginger Pot II shows us a geometrical tangle of incoherent lines, which might or might not have a meaning. But at the centre of all this, pure, rounded and still, gleams the pot, the one satisfying certainty amid the existential chaos. It is only when we are still, when we open up to our inner reality, that the things in our life fall into coherence for us. We do not necessarily have to think this out: silence makes the order plain. But instead we quieten our restless minds, and then rise to find that we see, now, the essential.
