Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter...
-George Harrison
I still have this thing where I apologize for my creative process. Or I don’t talk about it, keeping it to myself for fear that I might make someone in my audience uncomfortable. But as the ice sheets of hibernal contemplation slowly melt away, I’m struck by a series of questions. What if the act of self-expression that comes with setting forth one’s creative agenda authentically isn’t merely personal, but essential? What if it’s not an indulgence, but a responsibility?
Somewhere in my pre-teen years this tendency (to apologize—lie, even—about who I was) was crystalized within a conversation I had with a young friend at the time. He had asked me, out of nowhere—a stroke of inspiration no doubt—whether I would rather in my life be principled, or popular. After far less thought than the question really should have warranted, I remember—or rather, my mother reminds me—saying that I’d rather be popular.
I look back on that time with an air of Javertesque recrimination, pitiless to the inherent errant nature of youth, and accusatory—castigatory even—towards my ongoing attempts at that age to make people like me. This heedless quest turned me into a cruel, inhumane being, one who would just as soon turn on a friend or vulnerable colleague to score cheap social points as he would pet the head of an approaching dog.
This whole way of being led to a wholly regrettable existence. Some say that when you hit your sixties, people you knew from your youth start slowly dying away. The whole sentiment seems a bit of a cliché. Unfortunately, for a miserable group of us, we seem to have reached that age in our mid-forties. People have left us, neither fortuitously nor in favorable fashion, and knowledge of their struggle, their illness, has become our pain, our quiet anguish to work through. Regret takes on a whole new meaning in this theater, knowing that our unkind words and actions truly can never be reconciled.
What can be done? How can the soul be not merely soothed, but changed, lastingly, so that we learn from our behaviors rather than repeat them? Here is where I remember the term “metanoia,” to which I was made aware by the book “The Jesus Mysteries” by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. The work elucidates that the gospels, written by Greek scholars, would have used the word metanoia in the context of renouncing “sin” from one’s life. The common English translation is what we laypeople know as “to repent,” which conjures images of apology and/or feeling sorrow and looking for forgiveness, which is a handily straightforward thing to administer by a body ecclesiastical.
Harder for the clergy to dole out is the other translation of metanoia, which is, essentlally, “to have a fundamental change of heart.” This understanding of the word struck me as far more potent, because rather than simply saying sorry (then being “forgiven” by some force often external to the situation), this definition requires one to be accountable for one’s decisions. It’s all well and good to smash the neighbor’s window while playing carelessly, say sorry, then do it again the next day. More difficult, and much more impactful, is it to change your behavior, take more care while playing, and keep everyone’s houses intact.
The world, in this commentator’s opinion, asks for too much meaningless saying sorry, and far too little making actual substantive change. Thankfully I was given the opportunity for that fundamental change of heart shortly after my cruel behavior, when a seemingly-harmless prank by two friends destroyed my reputation and turned me into a pariah overnight. (I might talk about this later, although in twenty-first century hindsight it reflects perfectly well on me, whereas it would probably be considered character assassination, of these two individuals plus a fair number of members of my year in my house, for having acted so ignorantly, so we’ll see.) At the time, the feeling was excruciating. I was already being beaten up pretty badly by the terminally racist older students, and having no safety net in my own year made being in school quite close to unbearable. Tragicomically, my parents were too busy starting other families to notice (cheap shot maybe, but true.)
Somewhere in there I made a choice, to stop vying for attention in all the wrong places, realizing, as a certain green-skinned iconoclast might put it, “If that’s love, it comes at much too high a cost.” I don’t know how self-aware I really was, but there came a point where it just didn’t make sense to be unkind, whether to achieve social status, out of sick self-satisfaction, out of revenge, out of fear, or any other logically fallacious reason for doing so. Yes, there were still going to be people out there making an art out of being cuntwads (technical term), but that didn’t mean I had to be one of them.
Which brings me back to the subject of apologizing for one’s process. The shift in paradigm, from sitting down and shutting up, to recording then posting online every moment of your life, might be a generational thing, the former being something that people my age and older stick to because it’s seen as proper. But as the age of not just self-validation but active self-promotion lumbers on, I wonder if we, the more seasoned members society, need to change our mindset, and come to understand the act of self-expression as more than just aggrandizement.
We create the new not by fighting the old but by making it irrelevant, so declares the widely-known quote by Richard Buckminster Fuller (which I’ve, somewhat ironically, paraphrased here). For me, the act of doing what I do, putting together ideas, music, and story day in day out, is a subtle prayer in the only language that I know: positive creativity. Old fart (and getting older) that I am claimed to be, I have faith indisputable in my continued nimbleness of mind, that can recalibrate for the better should the circumstance of my life direct it. Everyone should be so lucky. Yet I believe everyone is.
Your power to create is infinite. Your power to summon the light is intrinsic. People are worried about the world because they think it’s a mess. And they’re partly right: right now, the world is a mess. But being worried about it has never been and never will be the way forward. I look at what is going on—everywhere—and I’m remarkably grouse free. I imagine it’s because I’m of the mind that if others are misbehaving, I can’t necessarily change that, but I can still choose the way I behave. One act of self-expression, when that expression is a moment of kindness, of productive positivity, is worth a dozen acts of cruelty, and at least a hundred gripes and complaints. We are so lucky to live in a time when there are shining stars, when there’s a universe out there that we can be conscious of. Express yourself, boldly. Harness your creative spirit and become one with luminosity. Love your process, and be your shining star.
Travel safe and talk soon.
-AF
Quote source: Here Comes the Sun (Harrison), The Beatles
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