A love of life (or lack thereof)
I have found that the optimism of adolescence is slowly replaced by the practicality of adulthood.
Hey there. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything. Even longer since I’ve shared anything that I’ve written. I’ve been reading. Working. Breathing.
But, this isn’t about writing. It is about life. Selfishly, it is about my life. Although I have found that talking about my life generally leads back to me talking about writing, both stuck together in an endless tug-of-war. When I thought of the title “A love of life”, I inevitably thought of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society enthusiastically talking about his love for life and poetry and art and creativity. Then I realized how over the years, I have kind of, sort of, just maybe, lost this love a little bit, slowly, gradually, suddenly. Hence, the slight change in the title “or lack thereof”.
I’m not trying to be sentimental or sensational. Not trying to make mountains out of a molehill or whatever that saying is. I realize things could have been a lot worse and the world is full of catastrophe and unfairness and calamity and whatnot. I realize my privileges and my fortunes and I am grateful for all of it. I also realize how easy it is for it all to come to a stop, with nothing but silence remaining and then, not even that. Yet, I can’t help but feel a certain lack of…enthusiasm(?) about life. About things and about people and places and art and everything that surrounds us. I’m not sad. I’m not depressed, not in the clinical sense of the word and not in the lousy throwaway sense of the word that people sometimes use either. I just don’t feel excited about life. A lack of enthusiasm is all there is, pervading every facet of my life.
I’m not really sure when it started. As I foreshadowed, the answer to my plight comes back to, you guessed it right: writing. Or more generally, creativity. At some point, I stopped allowing myself to be creative. Maybe it’s an age thing. As we grow older, we tend to talk ourselves into believing that our childhood dreams, which seemed perfectly reasonable at the time and perfectly achievable, are no longer so. That there is only one place for those dreams to exist and that place is in the past, where they should remain forever, frozen in time, never to be rekindled. I always thought I would be immune to this adult cynicism and skepticism, but I have made the mistake of thinking the laws of nature don’t apply to me. That I’m some exception, not the norm. I have found that the optimism of adolescence is slowly replaced by the practicality of adulthood.
I recently stumbled upon a TED Talk by Ethan Hawke where he said something that really struck a chord with me. A nail in the coffin, an arrow to the heart if you will. Here’s what he said.
“You know, a lot of people really struggle to give themselves permission to be creative. And reasonably so. I mean, we're all a little suspect of our own talent…Because I think that most of us really want to offer the world something of quality, something that the world will consider good or important. And that’s really the enemy because it’s not up to us whether what we do is any good…We know this, the time of our life is so short and how we spend it, are we spending it doing something what’s important to us? Most of us not.”
I think this has been my problem. Something that’s been holding me back, in writing and in life. Ambition without direction is a hellish place to be in and that’s where I have been most of my twenties. And it has really risen out of this desire to do something important, to create something good and meaningful and useful. Something that the world would consider, at the very least, not a waste of time. Yet it is true that the work I do and the things I create or can create and should create, their importance or goodness isn’t something I can evaluate before I do it.
“There is no path till you walk it, and you have to be willing to play the fool,” says Ethan Hawke. Haruki Murakami says something similar when he talks about whether his work will be considered great or not. It’s not up to him, he says, and the only way to judge the greatness or even goodness of his work is through time. Great work stands the test of time. And only time gets to judge it. Not us mortals. All we can do, all I can do, is give myself permission to be a fool and to be creative, juggling between creatively foolish and foolishly creative.
In his book The Anthropocene Reviewed, author John Green writes, “There’s something deep within me, something intensely fragile, that is terrified of turning itself to the world. I’m scared to even write this down, because I worry that having confessed this fragility, you now know where to punch. I know that if I am hit where I am earnest, I will never recover…But I want to be earnest, even if it is embarrassing.”
I am always in awe of writers and artists and people who are able to bare their souls in front of this world. A world that is ready to punch them where it hurts the most. Perhaps that is why we all wear masks. Every morning we put on an armor so we don’t expose our true selves, our naked selves. We hide our quirks and our eccentricities. We hide what makes us different and unique. We try to act “normal” in a world that wants to pretend everyone is the same: two eyes and a hat on a broomstick. And that leads to a problem. A problem of dishonesty, or at least a lack of honesty. We all are, myself included, dishonest with the people around us and with ourselves. We spend so much time pretending to be someone we are not, that we start believing the lie ourselves and forget our true selves. The mask becomes our real face, our real face gets buried underneath nowhere to be found.
We are constantly surrounded by other people’s opinions and ideas, family, friends, coworkers, bosses, teachers, gurus, leaders, YouTubers, celebrities, books. In a world so full of noise, it’s almost impossible to listen to ourselves. Who we are becomes an amalgamation of all the voices of the external world. I fear of losing all original thought, what’s innate within me, and only reacting to what’s outside. This is what, I suspect, leads to a life that lacks love for it and enthusiasm for it. And the only way to get it back is to drop the mask. To be honest. And genuine and vulnerable and exposed. “To be earnest, even if it is embarrassing.”
Giving ourselves permission to be creative, in whatever it is that we do, and the permission to fail and look stupid. Being honest in our endeavors, both with others and with ourselves. These are the two basic yet essential requirements for life, happiness, meaning, creativity, and art.
I am slowly trying to be honest with myself and the people around me, slowly trying to remove the armor, as scary as that is. Slowly trying to give myself permission to be creative and to be a fool. There’s a really high likelihood that I might fail, as is the case with any important journey. I want to be honest and I want that to be reflected in my writing, my art, and my life. As Neil Gaiman says, “All fiction has to be as honest as you can make it.” This is true of fiction, and I believe, this is true of all art and all of life. Perhaps then, maybe, just maybe, I will find my lost love for art and for life. And if not, well, what else is there to do?
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
— Edna St. Vincent Millay