Indulgence to Diligence

This week tested me. I started the process of a full-blown refinance on my loft. It's the one way, right now, to reorganize my personal finances, to get myself square by the end of the year, and to provide a fiscal cushion for the first six months of 2007.

My business partner and I plan to have initial funding in place for our company within the the first half of next year. We've been building the plan all this year. I'm ready, and I know the people who are depending on us are past ready. Breathe, two, three, four.

At the same time, I am in talks this week with an executive firm, possibly to go back into the workforce, functioning at a monetary level close the that which I left two years ago. Full-time.

All of this, plus a wicked, pernicious, head-cold-body-flu virus, put me into a funk. That deep kind of funk, where just thinking exhausted me. I've been falling over onto the sofa, prone, remote control in hand, watching anything On Demand.

I lost the ability to fantasize, much less write.

Once, someone said something to me about losing the ability to fantasize, losing the creative motivation. It was Dale Launer. I had dinner with him over ten years ago. We had just met, and if I recall right, we met a couple of times over as many days and talked and talked.

Given the unreliability of memory, I think he said something like, "When I'm depressed, I can't fantasize." He might have said, "I can't fantasize when I'm depressed." Either way, that statement stuck in my head.

I think he was right.

("Ruprecht, do you want the genital cuff?")

The freedom to accept creative inspiration, for me, means the elimination of money worries. If that were true, then the world's richest would be the world's writers. That blasted worry nearly shut me down.

The indulgence of creative writing, that indescribable urge that takes hold and requires the creation and assembly of words into phrases, sentences, stories, and more, it's like a drug. When it takes hold, it is a privilege and a pleasure. The goose bump kind. I cannot ignore it, it has to be addressed, and in that process, I take on a kind of diligence, striking a delicate balance between the torrent of inspiration and the subsequent rounds of editing - an iterative refinement.

I fell off the log for the past two weeks.

And then, mid-last week, my partner and I went to see a screening of the documentary film, God Grew Tired of Us. For the first time in Sundance Film Festival history, a documentary won the Grand Jury Prize as well as the Audience Award. The film traces the history of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan, focusing on three from among the thousands of boys displaced by the twenty-plus years of civil war in that ravaged country. Their families annihilated or forced into refugee camps, these boys flee, many perish, the remaining boys come together in a Kenyan refugee camp, before many are taken in my the United States, and given the opportunity to start anew. These boys, who grow into young men, who have suffered unspeakable horrors, somehow manage to convey a love and hopefulness that transcends the evil, and frightful hardships they have faced. They are beatific. I met one of them at the screening, John Dau, now in his twenties, who is doing the good work to help his homeland and his people. He is luminous.

The film was picked up by National Geographic. Everyone, go see it. 

My money troubles pale in comparison, and I am reminded again that living in the here and now is most important, and that life is a gift.

I'm not out of the weeds yet. But I will be. It's a small thing.   

Comments

[John]

Thanks for the post about God Grew Tired of Us. You can join John Dau, one of the lost boys featured in the film, in supporting projects to help the people of southern Sudan at http://www.directchange.org/sudan.

[Buffy]

Thank you for this post Holly.