A Simple Lesson in Being

For the last three months Jason and I have kicked around the idea of writing a blog.  Our mission and focus have changed along with regular life friction.  Initially, we looked too far ahead and considered legal implications of blogging. What if we write something benign that’s viewed as libel?  What if we succeed and the posts become a book?  Who gets what profits?  Who is responsible for expenses?  Do we need an LLC?  Should we blog or spend money creating a full blown website?  We tried to control the uncontrollable.  And what was lost? The actual writing and community building we use for fuel when our lives get too confusing.

We reevaluated our goals and learned a cheap yet extremely valuable lesson.  The funny thing is this: our friend (and wonderful illustrator / techie) George Coghill emphatically told us weeks ago to write and write and write and worry about the rest later.  We didn’t listen.  Our lives were full of too much noise.  I was trying to teach 5 freshman composition classes at two colleges, train for a marathon relay, satisfy my need for social interaction, write for the blog, look for a new apartment and job, and decide if I should move ten minutes away to Cleveland’s Cedar Fairmount district, forty minutes to Kent, 8 hours west to Chicago, south to New Orleans, or across the country to San Francisco.

I couldn’t be my best self and say what I knew to be true.  One by one the noise started to fade away.  My classes started to slow into a natural cadence; I exceeded my expectations at the marathon relay and took a few weeks off from training; I continued a heavy social schedule, understanding my own pattern of retreat once the October chill arrives; the apartment search ended, for now, and I focused on making professional connections based on Jason’s advice.  We quit pricing server space and worrying we were incapable of maintaining the website we envisioned.  It was clear we couldn’t do it.

We dropped the reins and could finally see how we worked best.  Jason’s training in Myers-Briggs gave him the ability to identify, based on my profile, I was trying to answer too many questions at once.  I’d forgotten to live.  This is an all too common case for me.  LIke a brother, he caught me before I fell into inertia and pushed me to take the trip to Detroit I’d started to rationalize wasn’t a real priority.  We got back to basics with a simple plan.  He’d send me brief sections of his graduate work to proof–I’d then take key ideas, add descriptive examples, reorganize the argument a little, clean up the language and post to the blog without his editorial OK.  I’d begin with his sketches and finish the painting.

We started to trust each other and understand independence works.  We didn’t need to be in the same room writing, that conversation alone cost us weeks too.  I didn’t need to clear every word with him before posting.  I didn’t need to worry about taking his triggers the wrong way.  Our friendship has proven the most challenging and random of my life.  I’m sure he has changed the course of my life because his rhetoric is not rhetoric.  He lives it, which is why I imagine he won’t be pissed only one sentence of his appears in this post.  I’ve got plans for the rest, and he knows I’ll use it all.  Space and silence have helped us use cut down redundancy and get cracking–and joke about being the Lennon / McCartney of blogging, a duo that feeds off one upping each other and competing.

Weeks ago Jason said a funny thing to me.  He said since we didn’t talk for over 10 years he could trust me.  I didn’t really get it until he sent me this yesterday:

Without the openness created by the silence of space we risk missing opportunities that surround us.  We have less ability to to have foresight, become more focused on tasks rather than people, and ultimately become victims of our past.

I can tell Jason lives by an optimistic credo–he thinks as Rilke suggests in “Archaic Torso of Apollo” that “you must change your life” by acting in the now.  But the problem with words is they have no relation to action, to the hard work it takes to live congruently with our wants and needs.

Anxieties are often repeated louder than inspiration.  Or worse, inspiration becomes a crutch, a hedge against taking risk.  We all know the people who, as Matthew 6:1 states “[practice their] righteousness before men to be noticed by them” (New American Bible) or “put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance so that they will be noticed by men when they are fasting” (Matthew 6:16).  I don’t know how to reconcile my own fear and anxiety with the wonderful light poetry, music, literature, and friends give me.  I know, for me, nothing lights the little lamp inside my soul more than accepting the mysteries I’ll never solve, by looking all around for the answers.

So I write this today and hope someone reads.  I hope it motivates you to act on your dreams, to continue the conversation with someone you trust, to swipe the gloom from your face and remember “The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear your whole body will be full of light” (Matthew 6:22) and use your body to noticeably blaze.

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