CREATIVE DEPRIVATION

(Submitted for Friday’s BELTWAY TRAFFIC JAM, since my server was down last night.)

It’s been cool, gray, and wet here in southeastern Wisconsin the last couple days, after a period of thoroughly springlike weather last week. Indeed, nearly all of our snow is gone; all that’s left is the grotty piles of snirt (you Northerners know what that is) in the roadside ditches and the corners of the parking lots.

It’s an early spring. The harbinger of spring around these parts is not birds, but fog: Fog is a sign that the massive snow drifts are starting to melt and saturate the atmosphere. The fog arrived around the 20th of last month; within eight days, the farm fields were full of deep-black soil and the smell of regrowth was hanging in the air. The bravest among us wore shorts last week.

But not now. It’s 38 degrees as I write this on an overcast, misty Thursday morning, and it will not get much warmer than this today. In other words, it’s going to be exactly like yesterday, when I had an epiphany on the way to lunch.

There’s a Subway about five blocks from my office; when I’m feeling unusually guilty and/or health-conscious, I walk there for lunch. The people of town have gotten used to seeing the burly pastor in the olive-green army coat walking along the highway with his hands in his pockets. Yesterday I stopped on the little bridge across the Rock River to see if the fish were feeding, an act which recalled other walking trips across other bridges in my past–the bridge over the little outlet of Lake Minnewaska in Minnesota, the bridge over the Illinois Central tracks in my hometown, the bridge over 1st Avenue in Cedar Rapids–and I remembered how I used to walk everywhere, all the time.

Of course, a lot of that is because I was too young to drive and/or didn’t have a car, but still . . .

On the remainder of the trip I noticed three architecturally-interesting houses which I’d never noticed before. I mean, they were always there; I just never noticed them beyond seeing an outline of a certain size and shape which told me “house, pre-1940s.” But they were really interesting, with gingerbread and second-floor balconies and all that. And I’d always missed them–even though this wasn’t the first time I’d walked past them.

Usually when I’m out walking, I’m anywhere but on the street. Being a good pseudo-Calvinist as most Americans are, I think of all pauses in the day as opportunities to keep working. So I’m usually mulling over some aspect of the church as I’m out and about. But yesterday I couldn’t shake the thought of what I’m missing by not being more in the moment, wherever I am.

Then I got in line at Subway, went right back into Calvinist mode, and totally missed the fact that one of my parishioners walked right past me.

It’s not like I’m missing out only on minor architectural details of Wisconsin factory towns, though. Nor am I so preoccupied with justifying my own existence that I turn off my face-recognition software in favor of wondering if in any of my sermons at this parish I’ve used the story about the time the cat and skunk were fighting outside my back door. All around me there are things happening which I never notice because my mind is always too busy to process them.

I’m serious. There are books on my shelf that I’ve never opened, CDs I’ve never listened to (or not all the way through, at least), shirts in the closet I’ve never worn, significant places in my own back yard I’ve never visited–even though I’ve meant to do all those things.

I began to wonder if I just had too much stuff competing for my attention. I mean, we clergy are notorious for whining about being underpaid, since we go to school for as long as doctors do (and longer than lawyers), but don’t get paid the same. But, in fact, my household income is signficantly higher than the median for households in my county. So maybe–definitely–there’s so much stuff in my life that I can’t possibly appreciate it all.

And that was my epiphany: I’d be glad to have less stuff if that meant that I’d enjoy what I had a little more.

I used to get a thrill out of the smallest stuff: a new issue of a magazine, the shows on PBS on Saturday afternoon, a simple, meandering drive in the country. But a new magazine now feels more like an obligation than a joy; the programming on PBS seems so irrelevant to my life (like it wasn’t when I was in college?); a drive in the country just means bouncing madly from radio station to radio station looking for some programming which doesn’t make my skin crawl. I buy books and don’t read them for months; I buy CDs and listen to the first three songs; I make plans for an afternoon of much-needed rest and relaxation, then find myself so twitchy and bored that I go to work halfway though it.

When did I forget to slow down? When did I, perhaps the ultimate type-B personality, turn into a giant, pulsating nerve ending, constantly seeking out the next stimulus?

It’s ironic how I, whose name may still be synonymous with “slacking underachiever” in my school system’s lexicon, am now a person who has to be reminded to stop working, to delegate responsibility, to let go and relax. It’s equally ironic that I’m constantly telling my wife this same thing, this message that somebody needs to say to me. I’m still trying to figure out how that happened. But it’s clear that what I need in my life is less. Less of what, it doesn’t matter. Just as long as it’s less.

The Calvinist in me knows that I’m 48 minutes late for work right now–never mind that I haven’t had a full day off since the first week of February, and I won’t have one today. And never mind that I’m salaried, anyway. My Calvinist also knows that, even if I’m going to be a slacker today, there’s a long list of errands I could and should run rather than wasting my time with a bunch of navel-gazing. I could’ve been to the grocery store and post office and back by now if only I’d been a little more organized, a little more motivated, a little bit better as a person.

But the still, small voice inside me says, Shut up, and just be here now.

And that voice is right. I’ve missed too much by reducing my life to a series of tasks to be prioritized and completed as efficiently as possible; no one has asked me to turn my life into a giant “to do” list to which anyone may add things. I’ve done it to myself, in a quest to justify an existence the validity of which no one was questioning.

So I think I’ll go spend a little time in the living room, with the TV and the lights off, just soaking up silence, stillness, and peace. Eventually the inner Calvinist and I are going to need to have a talk–which will consist mostly of my reading him an eviction notice. I will no longer let life get in the way of living.