The Publication of Internal Spaces
On August 1st I celebrated my 44th birthday. The following morning we packed up the car and drove seven hours to a lake in the Adirondacks.
I normally mark my birthday by sharing some bit of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way. This year I just wanted to leave.
I don’t know what it is. I think I’m tired of trying to live my life publicly. Maybe I just don’t want to feel like I’m being consumed. All the highlights of my life edited into 3 minutes of content and gobbled up like chips from a bag.
Creative work is hard work. It’s amazing and its exhausting and pausing in the middle of that to perform creativity for an audience feels violating. I’m not ashamed of my work, the good parts and the bad. I am ashamed because deep down inside I know that what I’m doing is too precious to be used as fodder to keep your attention on a screen while advertisers try to sell you mojito flavored CBD gummies and adult coloring books.
Art is how we deal with things. It’s how we cultivate our interiors. Good music. Good movies. Books we read. Stories we’ve heard. All done in service to making sense of being human. And, if its really good art, helping us feel being human more deeply. It gave us bittersweet and melancholy. Things we didn’t know we felt until someone sat down and figured out how to point a finger right at it so we could all see it and nod our heads because we felt it too.
There is something wrong about taking this private act and making it public. Because a private act done in public is a public act. By changing the venue you change the act. You sing in the shower differently than you’d sing in front of your high school reunion.
When you take this interior space and make it public it diminishes.
Look around and tell me you don’t see it too. It's like our spirits are worn thin.
So no, I have no wisdom to offer this year. Just more questions. What do we do? How do we fill our spirits back up? I think its an answer that each one of us has to figure out on their own.
in private.
