This is without a doubt my favorite time of year. As spring’s defrost button melts light and earth, and color returns to outdoors blasting lime green, soft pink and vibrant forsythia yellow, I shrug off blankets, both literal and figurative. I used to love winter- still do for a bit, but its charms wear thin by about December these days, and for the first time I actually “get” the concept of the “snowbirds.” (oh dear…do I see early bird specials in Ft Lauderdale looming in my future??) I welcome this time of open windows and chilly nights, somewhere between frost of winter and promise of summer. My heat still kicks on occasionally, but that’s just fine- the best is yet to come. There is something magical in that smell of wet earth and possibility (once it wasn’t coming from my basement) and my brain begins to thaw as I come full circle with the cycle of the seasons.
I’ve been thinking about the nature of creativity and the challenges we come up against when we hit road blocks in life or work. I was thinking, actually of the whole concept of “road blocks”. Although I’ve been writing, my blog’s been at a standstill for the last couple of months while I tended to other business, much of which was pretty uninspiring- and uninspired. So to “jumpstart” my sense of the possible, I escaped to the Catskills for a remarkable opportunity to take a deep breath, remove myself from “figuring everything out”, and just spend a few days breathing and listening. No decisions, no computer or phone, no work, no sump pumps or problems. Just listening….and breathing- with some pretty inspiring people. I recommend this kind of moment to all- a break in the action.
I hate road blocks. I will howl against them, dig at them and crowbar them, pick at them and relentlessly focus on them when up against them. This time I decided to let my roadblock sit there, not try to get around it or climb over it; just lean against it like an old friend, pop open an imaginary beer, raise my eyes to the sun, wait and see what happened next. For a change, I figured I’d shut up and listen. Hah. Not a strength of mine…
What I began to realize in this past year is that the people who get where they want to go don’t perceive road blocks in front of them. I, on the other hand, see them like a steeplechase course in which I’m a little pony surrounded by Appaloosas. Those damned blocks which loom in my life like ten foot brick walls are somewhere in their peripheral vision, so life takes them where they want to go despite all the obstacles and problems. They just head in that direction.
One of my roommates in the Catskills was a woman whose story crystallized that thought for me. Beautiful both inside and out, she grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and as a young woman was in NYC for a visit. While there, for no apparent reason, she read the “Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” and at the end knew exactly what she needed to do next in her life. She investigated college programs, booked a flight to Colorado, showed up at an admissions office mid-summer with no application, no visa and no money for tuition, and told them she planned to go there in September. She did, and spent the next five years studying with the some of the “best and the brightest” in the field of her dreams.
Hmmm. How to bottle a little of that sauce, I wonder?
What seems to happen to me when the blocks show up is that confidence drains through this little passage at the base of my neck-drip, drip, I can feel it slipping away until every idea I have looks shallow, dull or just plain boring, only to be discarded. So I’ve learned to save those potential gems in a growing file of rough cut diamonds just waiting for the day when perspective returns and my wit and work are remarried.
In the meantime, I’m learning to live with that proverbial elephant- not ignoring it, just letting it rest comfortably with my feet on its trunk. I figure we’re old friends now and it’s much harder to move an elephant than to hug it.
Life transformative moments seem to happen to other people- those brilliant moments of incandescent inspiration that drive them to purposeful exploration. I keep waiting for that to happen, like listening for an echo in a vacuum. While I wait, instead of wasting time I do some stuff like stand on my head and write a blog. And maybe for most of us that’s what life consists of- not that radiant explosion, but just doing the work we love and seeing where it takes us.
Of course I did buy a copy of the “Tibetan Book on Living and Dying.” Hell, who knows? I figure if I spend enough time inverted I'll figure it all out… not unlike a quote I found recently: “overnight success in 30 years.”
