RandomBliss: Getting Life Out of the Way of Living

Oh, the skin on this tree!

Listening to: One of my favorites, but wait for the screamin' brass cause then the dancin' starts -- the kind that brightens your day with some silly!

Bliss: I love finding movies and television shows that really exemplify the best that this visual medium can offer, and we just finished watching the first season of Dexter, which blew me away. The writing, the music, the acting...all of it, top drawer. But mostly what got me was the underlying theme of this show: that good and evil are not these easily delineated categories.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about seeing the bigger picture. I've been thinking a lot about seeing in general. Good sight, bad sight, how to improve sight.

And then writing yesterday's interview post got me to thinking about how we approach our lives through this lens of how we see ourselves.

Which, I think, is what leads to a ton of "should's" and "have to's."

For example, how much of what we do is done specifically to feed some version of ourselves that we think we are or that we want to be?

Do we help others to help them? Or do we help others because we've been told we are helpful and then feel obligated to that version of us? Or do we help others because we've been told we're selfish and so think we have to prove we aren't?

Oh, my, the spiral of thought we could get caught in if we continue along these lines, and yet, it seems so necessary to me. It seems like a sort of purification, a burning away that we have to go through to get to the real us, the one we were born to be and not the one that bad or ugly circumstances changed us in to.

This is what I mean by the title: we have to purge the should's and have to's of life out of ourselves so that we might go about really living.

So many of us feel a calling to art but the littlest thing comes up and we push the art to the bottom of the day's list and then never get to it and then go to bed feeling badly about our days. And no matter how many times this happens, we keep doing it.

I think this is especially a problem for women: this need to never appear selfish.

Is this why so many of the "great" artists of the world have been men? Not because of some conspiracy theory perpetrated by a larger patriarchy, but because women are raised to only think of others and to be "great" at anything means thinking a lot more about yourself?

How are we ever to have grand adventures if we can't leave the house because we have too many things and people to take care of?

Then, most of the time, we blame this stuck-ness on creative blocks -- when, really, it's "life blocks." Details, minor details, thousands of details of life getting in the way of our living.

I'm not here to propose any solution today. I'm here to propose confusion. We need to allow the confusion in the front door so that we might use it as a flashlight to see into this darkness. We need to climb into the attics and the basements, those traditionally scary places, and see what is hiding, waiting to be found.

What did we pack up years ago that needs to be let out?

What big picture are we not seeing for fear of seeing the truth?

What hard work are we resisting? What "good" work are we replacing it with? What is our own personal crutch?

I think it's time we walk on our own, eyes wide open -- no matter what we might bump into, no matter what bruises we might sustain.