The Middle

Do you ever feel equally self-aware and clueless? Welcome...

I desire reflective writing. I love the idea of sitting and filling pages with stream-of-consciousness writing. But when I sit to give form to fleeting thoughts, I inevitably come to a place where I just stop. The place where my judgmental self catches on to what is happening and shuts it down. It’s as if I sneak onto a movie set to make my own original and fabulous film, and then I’m suddenly caught; the cameras stop rolling, security is called and all is wrapped for the night.

But not today. Today I’m going to be extra sneaky. I’m going to battle through, which means a good portion of this will not ever make sense. In fact, I’ll probably delete those parts, so don’t you worry about it. Just make believe. The magic of Hollywood.

Last week I ventured to the TEDxMidland event and was mediocred. Is that a word? Let’s just say I was not wowed. But I was inspired to come home and immediately begin watching TED talks that did wow me. Talks and presentations and conversations that just blew my brain to pieces and made me remember why I love new ideas and new people. Innovation is not about business or finances or technology. Innovation is about people and humanity; it’s mystery and imagination.

One talk was given by the author of “Eat, Pray, Love”. She was funny and witty and beautiful, and I now want to be like her in every way. Have you ever met someone like that? Or watched them in some interview or presentation and in that moment, they are everything you wish you were? Not only that, but they actually inspire you to recognize that you could indeed be that put together and brilliant, if you just tapped into the amazing brilliance inside?

So anyway, back the witty and beautiful author. First of all, she should have played herself in that movie. More to the point, she expressed some amazing thoughts on the creative process. Recounting the ancient ideas that muses or geniuses or daemons were outside forces that came upon people, inspiring their creative endeavors, she promoted a return to the ancient practice of separating oneself and one’s self-worth from the creative process.

Here is what spoke to me:  We have some responsibility. We do not however, have all the responsibility. We do not owe our soul to our art. We may find some sense of meaning from that which we create, but those days when inspiration is out of reach, should not lead us to conclude that we have somehow lost our meaning. All of us are called to create – I truly believe that – but that doesn’t mean that every day we’ll create something we want to keep.

Back at the hometown TEDx event, one presenter (not quite as lovely as Ms. EatPrayLove) spoke on the importance of failure. We must fail often, he professed. We should crave and seek opportunities that may or may not lead to failure. We need to take risks and relish the process, even if the process leads us to a total flop.

Not so easy, says I. The challenge the presenter talked about is in finding ways of measuring or recognizing small moments of progress along the way. How do we celebrate the small steps that might lead to larger failures? Do we only rate ourselves on the end product? I think so. And I think, as did the speaker, that this is the major flaw in most of our processes.

Just the other day a friend introduced me to a new blog writer – new to me anyway. She (the blogger) is a recovering addict, a mother, a writer, a liberal Christian and, in short, a perfect fit for me. I was reading one of her earlier entries about her first days of recovery from alcohol addiction. I was astonished to hear her describing my life. She writes about sitting in her room one day with her sister and looking at what her life had become, or at least the outward signs of her life. Sitting on her bed, they surveyed the mess of clothes and wine bottles and old magazines that littered her bedroom. In that moment she realized she no longer knew how to value anything. Boom. I thought of what I see from that same place in my own house; empty shoe boxes, piles of clothes, trash, old books, just a mess of things that pile up and take up space in my house. Then I thought about all the other vantage points in my house where things are even worse. I realized that I too have lost the ability to value things. Or at least, my spectrum is skewed.

For some time now, I have been seeking some help with this predicament. About six months ago, I finally began to go to therapy to deal with… well, whatever came up I suppose. To be honest, I first went to therapy because someone finally said this to me: You are an amazing and insightful person; I think you should try going to therapy.

It doesn’t exactly sound like those two sentences go together. Maybe I’d always thought I couldn’t be amazing or insightful to anyone as long as I was broken and in need of therapy. So I chose to ignore one or the other, depending on the day. Until I finally got the memo that I could in fact be both. So I started therapy. I’m not sure if I like it or not, and I’m not sure if it’s helping me. I know that I’m thinking about certain things differently than I have before. It might be worth it for that reason alone. But that is another story for another day…or days.

I suppose that’s the point though. That at The End of any self-reflection is actually a Middle. There is always another story for another day. Heck, I literally wrote most of this story on another day. But none of it means anything when it’s still just an End. It only starts to mean something when it becomes a Middle; when we’ve disentangled the muse and can look back at our lives, or the products of our lives, with some degree of distance.

So if you’re looking for a good, solid wrap-up ending, this is not that entry. But check back, I’m sure it will make much more sense in the future.

The Middle.