Living questions

[Reverb 11 prompt for February]: One month into 2011, what question(s) are you living? Are there any prompts/questions that arose during #reverb10 that are still resonating in your life? Are you living new questions?

I participated whole-heartedly in Reverb 10, inspired in good measure by the sense of community. I also had time to spare in December, and if not for the holiday fever that swept through my office and the big chunks of downtime it afforded me, I likely would have limited most prompt responses to 140 characters or less. My creative output has fallen off a cliff so far in 2011, but I’m not sure there’s much I can do about it right now.

One of my themes for Reverb 10 was this perpetual struggle to manage multiple intentions given immovable time constraints. I talked about the seventeen things I’m forever juggling and the frustration of having to allow fourteen of them to hit the floor at any given time. While my schedule has been more or less the same for the past two years, my level of creative inspiration has been highly variable. When I’m inspired and on fire about life, I bring high-quality attention to everything I do, and so I take full advantage of whatever free time comes my way. But when I’m feeling tapped out, my attention is scattered, my focus fuzzy, and I can’t manage much more than mindless chores or grunt work.

To some extent, I’ve gotten better at accepting this ebb and flow, and I try to take advantage of the times when my inner flame is dim by narrowing my limited focus to projects that don’t require much inspiration. For instance, I have this box of seventy-two song idea tapes that has to be digitized, and I’ve made more progress in the past three weeks than I did in the previous three years. I’ve also been exercising regularly and keeping up with my Spanish self-study course. But still, I just don’t feel right when I go too long without dipping into the creative stream. I’ve recorded only one song so far in 2011, and published a mere five blog posts. In truth, this is about par for the course, but coming on the heels of December it feels like a big let-down.

Expectations can be a killer. Aside from the soul-sapping inherent in spending eight hours a day attending to mind-numbing administrative tasks, I had the wind sucked from my sails last week when my wife found out that series of hiring freezes at state universities had all but ended her bid to land a job this year. The main reason I’ve been treading water at this office gig for so long is that I’ve been waiting for my wife’s professional situation to play out. All these years of living in separate locations, of me putting my future career plans on hold, of us feeling perpetually unsettled–all this tension promised to be released this month after a couple of super-encouraging job interviews (at one university my wife was tipped off by multiple sources that she was far and away the preferred candidate). When my wife called me at work at an unusual hour last week, I was certain it was good news about this position. In the two seconds that elapsed between the ring of the phone and my wife’s first words, I imagined myself quitting my job, doing my happy dance up and down the hallway, giving my landlord notice we were moving, visiting the campus, finding our dream house, standing once again before the Pacific Ocean. But the tone of my wife’s “Hi” erased all that in a heartbeat. Although there is still a slim chance things will work out, the news of the hiring freeze left me feeling defeated and discouraged. I’ve used several metaphors to describe how I’ve been feeling: Like a marathon runner who thought the finish line was right around the corner, only to suddenly realize there’s actually ten more miles to go; like a prisoner who’s been unexpectedly denied parole; like a person stranded on an island whose heart lifts at the sight of a passing ship, then sinks when he realizes he has not been seen.

Such is life, I know. It’s always been a series of ups, downs and in-betweens, and it always will be. I’m sure it’ll all be okay in the end, although I’m not so sure I know what that really means.

And so my flame has been flickering, and it’s all I can do lately to keep it shielded from the wind and rain. Today, though, the sun is shining and the birds and squirrels seem to think it’s a fine, fine day. Setting aside the expectations and the regrets, I can’t help but think they’re right.