Meditative Prose
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Photo by auro
In my last post I mentioned my “general self-improvement effort.” This isn’t something I talk about usually, but it is something I never stop thinking about. Since before I can remember, I have been striving to become a different person: my ideal self, a fictional representation of all the virtues I have come to value most in life. In general I think this effort has helped me in many ways, but it regularly causes me lots of anxiety as well. It is a kind of insane perfectionist tendency complicated by my complete lack of patience and self-discipline. The result is that I continually set myself up for failure, as nothing short of my ideal self is good enough.
It’s not my goal here for anyone to feel sorry for me. In fact, I’m not even particularly sad about it tonight — just hoping that a large dose of public honesty will do me some good.
The reason I am writing this now is that, a few nights ago, I dreamt I was flying. The first time I ever had this dream when I was a little kid, I was in my back yard under the big walnut tree, and I just knew that if I lifted my arms and looked up I’d start flying, the same way a bird knows to flap its wings. So I looked up at my raised arms and the black branches of the walnut tree above me, and soared up, and dove straight down again only to pull up at the last second. It was like playing, completely carefree and natural. The dreamscape was so realistic that when I woke up I really believed I could fly. I raised my arms there in bed, and started crying when I didn’t float away.
This time I was by Lake Champlain in the summertime, at a park that was kind of like Oakledge but not quite. Again, I flew around effortlessly, but my range was greater than when I was young. I explored the park, went over the grassy areas on the hill and high over a huge oak tree, and swooped down near the beach and soared out over the lake. (Could you guess that I love roller-coasters and plane trips?) I don’t know why I think this dream is significant, but I do. Maybe when I was young it was just a kid living out his video-game fantasies, but now I think it’s a response to the amount of pressure I put on myself during my waking life. In my dream, I am truly free. I don’t think about work, or what time it is, or how to make myself better. In fact, I don’t think about anything at all — I just fly around, fueled by joy, playing the way I did when I was a kid.
Saturday, 18 October 2008
Photo by Scott Ingram
I never meant to abandon this site for two months. Granted, it was a busy two months, but that’s not the point: I should be able to contend with the busy parts of my life, and still have time and energy to devote to worthwhile creative pursuits like this journal (and all the other things I never do). But I let my life take me a for a ride again, and it all culminated this week when I got back from Chris and Jerilyn’s wedding and immediately got a horrible head cold. Now that I’ve recovered a little, I feel this acute sense of regret that I’m not able to live more gracefully. I am constantly playing catch-up, and the result is that friends go un-emailed, parents go un-called, websites go un-updated, and I am constantly apologizing. This, I think, is what Henry meant by a life of “quiet desperation.”
Every time I have ever had a website (and I have had many), this has happened. Every single time. I painstakingly design a site that suits me, build it to my exacting standards, then start off strong, posting regularly. Before long, and without fail, new entries become less and less frequent, until eventually I give up altogether. The funny thing is that I always try again — a new name, a new design, but the same story. But I keep trying because I know this creative outlet is something I crave — I just haven’t figured out how to do it right yet.
When I think about it, this website is one of the best things I do, and it could be so much better. Ideally, this space could be the epicenter of my creative life, a place to brainstorm and share ideas with friends and family, explore and fix my creative process, and post the photos, drawings, and essays that I’m particularly proud of. It could be a living portfolio and notebook. That is what I’ve always wanted in a website, but that’s not something you can do if you’re always trying to play catch-up. So let it be known that, as an extension of my general self-improvement effort, I will be trying to post here more often. Feel free to judge my success or failure by whether or not I have to apologize again.
