How do you set your priorities?

This painting has been haunting me in its purpose because it's a sudden internal shift from trees and all their symbolism to a cityscape. Did I need to do that for more people to understand me, or was it something inside of me that wanted a new or rather re-visited challenge? The answer to this question I don't know even now after the painting is finished.

What I do know is that it was a true lesson in setting priorities. What is more important to me - the infinite sky, the haunting water, or this magical town highlighted by rays of sunshine? It was a constant adjustment of what hides and what comes out. Especially fascinating was how the darkening of one element brought out another. 

One day my friend and teacher, Andrey Tamarchenko, came to visit, and said that textures can be varied throughout - treatment of water and sky should be softer than the rough outlines of a city with its decaying walls. I ended up making the sky and water more pale, and suddenly the city became clearer, as if coming out of a mist. But it bothered me because the city wasn't my focal point. It was actually the opposite - what I loved was the cityscape's complete integration into the landscape, how it effortlessly coexisted with the cloudy sky and the murky water. I changed it yet again to level out the planes, and that made me happy. So is the lesson to take away from this process the opposite of what I'd initially thought, and in fact you can really have it all? Or that perhaps you always need to make a list of priorities?