Tag Archives: Introspective

Just Some Encouragement

Do you ever look back and wish you could do something over? The decision to date that person in high school, perhaps? That thing you blurted out because you were way too tired that irreperably damaged a friendship? Perhaps it’s something bigger, like your major in college, or the career path you feel locked into now. At the end of the day, despite a veiled claim by an ex-girlfriend, I think that everyone regrets something.

Initially, I’d say that I regret the story arc more than individual plot points. That is, I wish I had held a fundamentally different perception of my compass heading. The reason for this is that I was constantly moving from one box of a compartmentalized life to another for years, working from the starting point that I had to choose one and stay with it if I ever wanted to be anything when I grew up. Thus, I just tasted everything on the buffet, thinking that doing so was part of a decision to choose my permanent entree. This mindset began toward the end of my college career, when I was pressured by well-meaning loved ones to exit stage left from the production of trying different things and decide on something that would earn a living. Thus, the compartmentalization began.

Only shortly before I began grad school did I experience my first inkling that life is more holistic than that. I think that wrestling through that was a huge part of my graduate studies, one that informed my research, and for which I am so much better off now. You might even call me more enlightened. In any case, I feel as though I’m emerging from the other end, and recognizing that a holistic worldview leads to an interdisciplinary academic pursuit. And I can’t even describe the freedom that comes when you stop trying to decide which one of your million interests you want to nail yourself down to pursue, and realize that they are all just different ways in which to see the others, different ways to overlap and illumine each other.

I know, I know, I’ve written about this (too) exhaustively here, but I’m a firm believer. So go pick up those extra interests you’ve always wanted to devote more time to, recognize that a job is just a job and maybe, just maybe, careers are illusions. In fact, try something new, just for the fun of it. Don’t even lock yourself into one type of pursuit (science or art, right-brained or left-brained). Exercise the muscles on the other side. You may discover yourself to be like me, and completely mathematically clueless. Or, you might discover that you’re the next Renaissance man or woman.

Give something a try! And I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Flashpoints

I once read a quote by one of my favorite playwrights, Beth Henley. She said that, to get a script moving, you take two characters, and you get them into an argument.

A couple of months ago, I was working on a script that had stalled. So, I took Henley’s advice. I put the protagonist and her sister into a fight that had been a long time brewing, and suddenly the protagonist found her voice for the first time. I could hear her in my head exactly the way she would sound! That’s one of those events that a writer hopes will happen in every project.

There’s something about a dramatic exchange motivated by frustration and hurt that removes the inhibitions we subject ourselves to under normative societal expectations, and permits what’s in our souls to pour out…the good, the bad, and the ugly, all of which would likely have been otherwise self-censored. Two people discover exactly what is on the other’s mind, and the elephant in the room is abruptly revealed in those “heated exchanges.” In the script of my life, I hate it when it comes to that point. Karen and I have experienced a few of these “heated exchanges” in our marriage. None of them have been pleasant, and, at least at first, were the result of small things that could have been talked out calmly instead. In more recent times, however, I’ve found these arguments to be catalysts. When you place two lives together, they move on a continuum. Ideally, they move forward together, and make progress. Sometimes, like my script, they stall. I’ve found a profound truth, however, in the fact that you never stay still on a continuum for very long. You either regain momentum, or begin to slide backward.

Karen and I had two ground-breaking discussions recently that have been incredibly healthy for our marriage. They were the result, at least in part, of an argument that occurred because a handful of issues had overheated. Now, ideally, those issues would have been handled individually before they reached that point. Not as dramatic, and it doesn’t make for nearly as good a script, but it’s better for my blood pressure when I’m the one arguing. This recent argument became a catalyst that propelled us forward, restoring momentum when we had began to drift backward.

I suppose that, when two people stall out, you can take them and put them into an argument…

I’m thinking of this tonight as I listen with a heavy heart to the sounds coming through the wall of our apartment. As well-constructed as our building is, you cannot help but hear when someone yells at a certain volume. That particular argument was punctuated by “blah blah blah” and “f***k you.” Not pleasant to hear. I’m aching for the people (I presume a couple) involved. I’m hoping that this serves as a catalyst to restore forward momentum for them, so that they won’t digress backward.

When an actor is preparing a script, two of the first questions that they ask themselves are: what does the character want, and what is keeping him from getting it? That is the motivation for our theatre of life, as well. These moments of friction occur because we are experiencing frustration at an inability to get what we feel we (sometimes desperately) need. Psychology tells us that behaviors are a way of getting what we want, or obtaining a desired result. Theatre calls this conflict, and it is the essence of a story. Without conflict, the plot doesn’t move. How unfortunate that, no matter how hard we endeavor to make it otherwise, we don’t seem to experience the positive until we’ve waded through the negative. As Buechner would have said, we have to experience the tragedy before the comedy, and both before the fairy tale.

I hope that your conflicts…these unfortunate flashpoints that ignite between us and those we love… always move you toward a more positive place.

And now, perhaps I should re-visit that script from a few months ago…

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Ocean View

I’ve groaned a lot about Spring in the Southeast lately. When I lived in the Northeastern U.S., winter was the season I dreaded most. I was excited to move south, because I knew that I would no longer have to dread the days on end with only the most obscure sunlight, endless slush and white landscapes, and dreary grey skies. I was right, of course. Those experiences are all but extinct here. What I didn’t expect was that winter would be replaced by spring as my most hated season, because I have never experienced allergies of this magnitude. The first time I saw my car yellow with pollen, I couldn’t fathom what was happening.

Such is life, right?

I remember my introduction to Florida well. While I didn’t grow up in a coastal area, the beach seduced me with its beauty on my first visit, and I’ve longed for it ever since. That evening, only slightly tired after a relatively normal travel day, I stood with a friend looking out off of the parking deck of the airport and was stunned by what I saw. Later, driving over the water, I nearly lost my breath. The following day, walking the white sand of Clearwater Beach and watching the sunset over the Gulf at the end of the day, I was so hopelessly in love with that place.

I’ve never been back to Florida, despite every intention to return. As summer nears, and I watch the change in the way the evening light falls over the streets and hills of Virginia, I find myself wishing desperately that I was back in Tampa. I think, also, that the place, as much as I loved the area, is somewhat metaphorical for where I otherwise find myself positioned in life; that is, somewhere I have tasted and in which I long to exist, yet find so incredibly elusive at the moment.

Career goals play into that discontent. I’ve lived the 9-5 grind, and I am so, so over that now. I no longer define my success by moving into the corner office (amazing how it doesn’t matter after you’ve achieved it). I’ve made moves forward: I continue to experience the addictive rush of theatrical magic when the lights warm the stage, and, while I haven’t sold the “Great American Novel,” I am not un-published for the last few years, either. Yet, I am longing to reach a place in life that I feel I should already have attained given the fact that I’m only a few years south of 40, and feel as though I haven’t been paying nearly enough attention to dreams and wishes along the journey.

Blah on professional wardrobes and corner offices, anyway.

I’ve tasted the ocean air with a scandalous passion, and yet have never been able to hold onto it for the long term. I’m just too stubborn, though, to give up hope, because I know that I will eventually wake up every morning to that metaphorical sand and ocean (hopefully with an identical geographical experience). Yet, I don’t want to call it achievement, because that makes everything, again, about success and material gain, which I’ve discovered to be worthless in and of themselves. This is about doing what I’ve realized is in my DNA, the piece of my soul I’ve discovered requires feeding to remain in possession of any sort of vitality…a “something greater” to which success must be attached if it is to have any significance.  I’m experiencing that in fleeting moments now, but am forcing myself to remain confident that the experience will be consistent in the future.

Until then, I cope with spring. Feel free to send me postcards of coastal sunsets. One day, I’ll be happy to return the favor when needed.

Monday Night Rambings

So, I’m sitting at the local Panera Bread thinking about what sort of post I’m going to write this week, and the only thing that’s making my brain work is the couple that is sitting sort of diagonally to me across the restaurant. They’re a college-age couple, very obviously on a date. The guy’s body language is open, inviting. The girl’s body language is a little coy, playfully interesting without being all-out flirtatious. After the guy brought the food back, he looked like he was praying briefly…”giving thanks,” I imagine…and she was respectfully quiet, but stole a curious glance at him for something he said, then smiled and closed her eyes again quickly. When he looked down at his meal before starting to eat, she slipped her chewing gum out of her mouth and secreted it into a napkin completely incognito from his awareness. I can’t help but smile. They’re a cute couple.

Before you start thinking I’m weird, let me say that any writer or actor or painter or anyone else of a creative bent is always observing those around them…seeing people, watching interactions, analyzing mannerisms. Creativity comes from the stuff around us, from the people around us. We’re surrounded by our inspiration constantly. The problem is, we stop to really observe it so infrequently that we’re sort of surprised at the depth of it when we do.

At least, that’s the unfortunate pattern into which I feel myself lapse. This afternoon I found myself with the much-coveted opportunity to slow down and have a quiet 30 minutes. I had time to read, to stop and think about what I had read, to let my thoughts wander. Now, at the risk of sounding mystic (not that I’m opposed to that), I felt so much more connected to the life around me. People, animals, even flora and fauna. Not that I was experiencing a pantheistic euphoria, but instead I had just had enough space and quiet to allow the things that are dulled into the background by a hectic life to return to the foreground. As always, I re-discover that the foreground is, in fact, their rightful place.

That pleasant state of mind and awareness was broken all too quickly when I once again had somewhere to be, and life intruded afresh as I navigated through traffic, listening to the voice of my GPS instruct me as to where I should turn, and worked on beating the deadlines of things to complete before arriving at home in time to prepare for guests…you get the idea.

Tonight, however, now that I find myself again with a few moments to spare, I am still much more aware of what and who is around me than I was this morning. This is the stuff from which creativity flows, because it is life…and creativity is about life, and portraying it in its comedy and its tragedy. That life is what gets lost in the rush of our day to day, because we stop seeing the forest for the proverbial trees. Then, when we pause to realize just how cool the trees are, we’re stunned as though we’ve never experienced them before.

So, my hope for you this week is that you find a shockingly quiet moment or two. I imagine that, if you do, the things with which you find yourself busy will come out the beneficiaries for that, as well.

Providential Pursuits

As I recently alluded to in recounting my sonnet-writing adventure, I’ve had difficulty making up my mind at times.

The fact that we are largely the sum of our experiences is a basic fact with which I don’t think most of us would argue. What we have experienced makes us who we are today. Some attribute this to chance, some to providence or the guidance of the Divine, but I think we would all agree that the end result is the same. Which makes it remarkable to me that I just didn’t get it for so long.

When I finished my bachelor’s degree and became professionally engaged in the behavioral health field, I threw myself into that field, feeling that I had to forsake previous experience at worst, or relegate it to the status of a hobby at best. While making what I thought at the time would be my career in psychology, I still wrote and did things like designing special effects for a haunted house Halloween fundraiser for a local youth center to give myself creative outlets. At the end of the day though, I struggled with seeing myself holistically, feeling at times that I had wasted years and becoming frustrated that I felt I was always distracted by this or that, constantly being drawn into something new that interested me and immersing myself in the world of some new discipline.

Then I had an epiphany (I mention those a lot here, don’t I?). I had moved to the city in which we currently live to begin grad school. I was hanging decorations in my new apartment, attempting to decide what of the life I had brought with me in disarray merited a position of honor on my bedroom wall. One of the items I chose was a set of porcelain theatre masks that I had collected during my undergrad days. I think it was then that I realized that the days of my college years didn’t have to be just a part of my past that I remembered fondly, but should also be recognized as a very important part of who I was, and who I am. Sort of like playing an album that you haven’t listed to for years, and finding that you still remember all of the lyrics.

Today I was contacting former professors to arrange letters of reference for a doctoral program application. I ended up exchanging emails with one of my favorite professors from my undergrad days, and it was great to re-connect. That sparked my looking at photos and recalling that formative period of my life, something to which I seem be given much more frequently in the last three years or so. I’m remiss in keeping in touch with those who have been influential in my life, and these transitional periods have a way of bringing us back into contact with each other.

I know I’ve frustrated and bemused many people through the last few years, seeming to be the one who couldn’t make up his mind, who was involved in one of several disciplines at any given time, and who would never decide what he wanted to be when he grew up.

In fact, I think that those experiences are finally combining to make something fascinating, because I’ve found the point at which all of these disciplines intersect to be far more interesting than any one discipline in itself. I can hear someone joking that “interdisciplinary” is just a word for someone who can’t make up their mind, but I think that it’s actually a quite necessary exploration. I think that individuals are cast in artificially compartmentalized roles because our culture doesn’t permit them to explore what they do through the lens of another interest. I’ve discovered that theatre and therapy work together beautifully, and theology and theatre, and poetry and mass communication. All this time I’ve been placing parts of myself into a corner, not realizing that all the parts of myself would play so nicely together, because I couldn’t immediately see how they would interact.

I sincerely hope, however, that I’m going to spend the next few years discovering how.

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