Unquiet Desperation

Just before I left for Origins, the poster you see off to the right was delivered to my home. It’s an artistically-lettered print of a poem by Neil Gaiman, entitled “Before You Read This.”

It’s a wonderful poem, and I deeply appreciated getting it. But there was no note. I had no idea who sent it.

It took a little while, but I found it was my partner in crime, Kris Johnson. I wanted to thank him publicly for being such a swell guy, and for getting me something because, in his words, “I knew you’d like it.”

The great thing about the poem (which will be framed and placed over my desk in my office), is that it invokes more images than it describes. What I mean is, as you read it, it pulls ideas to the forefront of your mind, and so far, I’ve found that it jumpstarts my creative process. Like a meditation.

If you want to have a little fun, follow the link and read the poem from the end to the beginning. To twist things, read some of the stanzas as “Before You Write This.” It takes on whole new meanings.

Buy one for yourself from the talented Todd Klein.

I’m not sure about you guys, but the world is wearying me more easily these days.

It might be the last two years of absurdly hard work on my part, it might be the move back home. It might be starting a new job.  it might be all of these things, but I feel like it goes deeper than that.

Sleep can recharge the body, but how does one recharge the soul?

That’s where the weariness lies, I think. Life fatigue — the spirit is weak.  The speed at which things happen, the constant barrage of media, of the tasks you MUST do, the sense of false urgency that surrounds us today.

I was out in L.A. when I realized that I spent so much time “reasoning” things out (read: whistling in the dark), trying to control situations around me, that in the end, I felt like it was all slipping through my fingers because you cannot hold on to so much. My wife calls it living in my head. Critical thinking is good, but sometimes it’s better to feel; to drink in life instead of breaking it down so you can digest it.

The soul doesn’t exist to consume the world. It’s meant to experience, revel in, and produce beauty.

I know that all of you reading this are busy people, so I ask you, how do you take care of your soul?

As I said in a previous essay, I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves. Along with that, I’ve been considering the way we see other people’s stories. How we watch then, listen to them, and if they have something we feel we need, how we try to adapt their stories to fit into our own.

This is a useful exercise. When we see a person’s life through the lens of history, such as a personal hero from the past, we do not see all their failings, all their personal struggles. We see an idealized version of them, and we take the qualities of their life that we seek to emulate and attempt to graft them on to our own psyches.  We learn and grow this way, trying on stories as we would garments, and when they do not suit us, casting them off.

These days, we live in an information-rich climate. The stories surrounding us, bombarding us at times, all seem to carry something that we’d like to make part of ourselves.  I’ve found this to be especially true with the people I’ve met through my work in the podcasting community, where tales of individual drive, perseverance, and passion have turned normally shy people into the writers, musicians, and broadcasters we know and love.  There’s much that’s worthy of being emulated there.

There are times that we select beliefs or qualities that make sense to us, only to have them cause dissonance with other, more deeply-rooted attitudes. In my life, that’s been Skepticism vs. Spirituality.

To explain: I know a number of atheists and skeptics. I’ve had a number of discussions with them, and to a great degree, their arguments make a great deal of logical sense to me. My own belief in a God (capital G) has been wavering for years now, and as I make my professional life in a world of logic, the arguments put forward by my skpetic friends are appealing to me. Facts make sense, and believing in things you cannot prove makes none.

However, on a deeper level, my inner life has always been one of mysticism, symbol, and faith.  I was raised Catholic, and when I hit the point in my life when I wanted to break out of the Church, I gravitated toward other mystical beliefs: neopaganism and the occult being a major part of that. In retrospect, I can see that I moving from one ritual-based practice to another because it was the motion and poetry of the rituals that I fell in love with, not the actual theology.

In the past three years, these two systems have been causing me some serious internal dissonance. In trying to find a way to make these things work together, I’ve worked myself into a cycle of doubt that has been crippling.  One side, the logical side, tells me that all my beliefs that I cannot prove with facts are bollocks, and the other side reminds me that humans work on a deeper level than mere logic, and that Significance is not fact-based, but instinctual and symbolic. It’s a battle that is deeply troubling.

The effect of all of this is that, when I take the skeptical path, I tend to be bitter and angry, and when I take the spiritual, I’m insecure and full of doubt.  I do not like the way my life tastes when I am purely skeptical, but I worry that I will float away into a never-neverland if the spiritual should take over.

I do not know where the balance point in my own life lies, but I’m reasonably certain that I’m not the only person fighting this internal fight.  If you are one of those people with this same inner turmoil, how do you balance it? What beliefs have influenced you, shown you where your strength lies, and how did you come to your decision?