To Enter Silence

I read a blog today titled "A Manifesto for Wimps, Dreamers, What-If Junkies, and Procrastinators" and this new blog site is my response.

I keep having these moments of clarity when I'm sitting around the house in my pajamas that "I need to be doing something productive," which usually means looking up stuff online. Like what grad school I should attend, or who is writing new books (that I need to figure out how to convince Marla we need to buy), or how to turn one of my guitars into a baritone "for that one sound I need." And then there are times when I'm frustrated at the world that not enough people have food and quality health and that billionaires can run for president on the platform of disabling those who "don't work hard enough" because outsourcing jobs and running well-intentioned businesses into the ground is "good honorable work."

But I keep being reminded that the best work I can do for the world and my little corner of it, must sit within the framework of my creation, aptitudes, abilities, and spiritual gifts. "For the body does not consist of one member but of many,"(1 Cor. 12:14). I am only one member. I can only do the work that is instilled in me to do. It is physically possible for me to do any number of functions in this world, but it is when we use our beings most fully as they were formed that we begin to work in conjunction within the body. This work, this action of ones being is not necessarily occupation, but the attitudes, outlooks and the way life is lived out in the means given for the body/mind/spirit/soul of each person.

In the aforementioned post, Tina Francis describes the word Frissen as "a sudden strong feeling of excitement or fear." This frissen is what drives people who are driven. It is the feeling that keeps the Wimps, Dreamers, What-If Junkies and Procrastinators from stopping entirely. From dying before death. You can't be a wimp or a dreamer if there is nothing to wimp-out from or to not dream of. Nothing to phrase the words "what if," if there is no sentence to follow. Nothing to procrastinate from, if there is nothing that should have already been done.

I've been wimping out for the last four years or so. I've been doing just enough to survive and to remind my self that I had a dream once. Many dreams actually. I only get close enough to "see that it wont work" and sit back down in front of the computer to read about other people's dreams and what great things they are doing about it.

I've stayed small because you can hide easier when you are small. You don't fall as far when you are small. You can't get crushed all that much when you are small.

I don't think I've ever been truly content. I've always had a pang in my gut that I wasn't quite doing what would fulfill me. I found too much comfort in the misery. I was close when I had the recording studio. People looked up to me. I drove a nice car. But really it wasn't enough. In fact it showed me how much more those things were useless. When it came to me being one member of a body.

That time pointed me in the direction I should go. Yet, I keep standing to the side of that path looking at how cool it would be to go down that path someday.

 In December I signed up for this writing thing called Figment, were they would email you a new writing prompt each day so that you could every day. I currently have 190 unopened Figment emails. I think I followed one prompt and thought about another. I'm not necessarily going to write every day now that I've started this blog. But I'm going to commit to at least one blog every week. Steps are all that we can take at any given moment. So, here is one step.

A time to step into my silence. A time to allow my self to be interrupted by my self. To not take in the outside world. Yet to work out the problems that are set forth for me to overcome in the outside world.

Here's to initiating FRISSEN in my life. And hopefully in yours.