Lists

I'm a list maker. I make lists to help me focus on the things I feel I need to do. And while it helps at work it doesn't help in my personal life. I have a daily list:

• Write
• Exercise
• Practice piano
• Read

It's not long and yet I never seem to do each thing every day.

It's not lost on me that these are mostly creative things and I feel creativity is lacking in my life. I have no doubt that part of the cause of my lack of motivation is fatigue. With three kids, there is homework and bedtime routines and general chaos. It's like my batteries get so drained that I don't have the energy to do the things that would recharge them.

So I've decided to attack them one by one and get them into my routine. This blog was my attempt to do the first item. I'll admit it's been slow going largely because I don't have a lot of ideas. But, as I've heard so often, one of the best cures for writer's block is to write. So here I am rambling on and inflicting the result on any unfortunate soul who happens by.

I also write a poetry blog (Time for a Poem) and have used Three Word Wednesday as a prompt for that and I suppose I could do the same here. I suppose it is a rather docile approach to the problem but there's nothing wrong with going with the tried and true.

The last item on the list has been tough because I have started a book that I'm not particularly enjoying and yet it is hard for me to quit a book in the middle. The book is The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens. I really expected to like it more. I loved Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol is probably my favorite novel and yet I feel that compared with the bang of those works, this one is just a whimper.

Maybe I should rearrange the list into a better order of attack as in:

• Write
• Read
• Practice piano
• Exercise

And then just drop TPP in favor of something else once the play is complete. I do have an enormous list of books I would like to read and I am open to suggestions if anyone has them.

Low Momentum

The day I wrote the first blog post I had a thousand ideas going through my head about what to write and do. But then, as so often happens, "life got in the way." Or, more specifically, I got busy. I am in a play right now (Picasso at the Lapin Agile with Middletown Lyric Theater) which means I do have a creative outlet.

The play and rehearsals are going well but I'll admit I don't get as much out of the experience as I once did. I think the primary reason is that the last few plays I've been in have lacked the kind of cast bonding I'd grown to rely on for my social outlet. When I was first involved in community theater there was something compelling about the group working to produce the play. The cast and crew would form an almost family bond. This was as true of the small shows (3-5 people) as of the large ones (over 100). When I think back on them, I am reminded of the Catholic Church's description of a sacrament as an outward sign of an inward change. The play was a tangible outward sign of an inward change that this group of people had undergone together. This inward change was, for want of a less cliche term, the formation of a community.

And, at the heart of it, that is what I feel is missing from my spiritual life: community. I have come to find that what religion really provides us is not so much a sense of purpose or an answer to the "universal questions" but a belonging to a community. The resurgence of religion in America, especially the non-denominational variety, is likely not an answer to our sense of fear or a backlash against our materialistic society as a response to our abandonment of community. Nearly all of the institutions that were the outward sign of the American Sacrament of Community have either been torn down from without or within. Couple that with our ever growing drive to be productive at work and micro-manage the raising of our children and we find ourselves thirsting to be part of something that was, in other times, a pervasive part of the human experience. And so we flock in droves to mega churches in the belief that Belief is is what we lack.

I'm reminded of the quote by the character Lewis Rothschild in the movie The American President. To paraphrase: "People want community, and in the absence of genuine community, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want community. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand."

Well, since I refuse to drink the sand, I'm still crawling.

Day 1

Well here goes nothing. Or something. As indicated in the description, I feel like my life has become stale. I used to do so many creative things and now, not so much ... unless you consider web surfing creative.

I still do some creative things: my job has aspects of creativity and I perform in community theater once a year but I used to write more (both prose and poetry) and play and write for the piano.

I'm also interested in expanding my spiritually. And by that I don't mean religion per se but a better understanding of this thing we call life and our place in it. To aid myself in that, I've been consuming a fair amount of podcast material on my daily commute. My favorites are This American Life, On Being, and Serial. I've also been following the work of Carlton Pearson. (If you are interested in podcasts, I highly recommend the Podcast Addict app.)

So this blog is going to be a rambling examination of many things but will mostly consist of my personal experiences in these areas. I encourage comments and hope people start to join the conversation and thereby join the journey.

Stay tuned.