An impulse for your compulsion...

Staring out the window on a sunny day, turning real life into a one-channel television without a volume. Every item on the floor takes on a personality of its own, a micro chasm and reflection of my mind. Clutter, surrounded by order. Invitations to action and monuments to stupor. Ideas half finished lay as charred ash in the trey and slanted words in beaten Moleskins. Artifacts of the past and the future hide as crumpled socks and a unplugged mouse. Every item lying as if in an airport terminal, patiently waiting to be picked up and whisked away to the next chapter, the next brush with activity and the future.

The lamp, blown over by the wind, invites the eye like a single chick in a carton of eggs. The pink of its shade is eclipsed only by the tuft of its texture, it’s support four treble clefts twisting lazily around the staff created by the panels of the hardwood floor. How can it be anything other than an obvious metaphor for all the music that’s been made, and has yet to exist? Perhaps it’s just the creation of a passion wanting desperately to return to the surface, to enliven the agent to action and creation?

Something has to give. This hibernation has been too long, too stagnant, too rife with inertia. It’s the dark side of homeostasis and physics; a body at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force. But where are the outside forces, where is the catalyst to increase the frequency of the reaction of action? Perhaps there is no equation, perhaps it more of a process. Our internal fusion, how to flip the switch?

I wonder though, why isn’t the process self-sustaining? Why does the will take leave in the midst of motivated plans, why is halfway complete an acceptable time to call in finished? Some might say distraction, or perhaps urgency more specifically, but is that an existential component of human nature or a trick of the socially cultivated mind? Why is it some hard to find half of a nest, or a quarter of a burrow yet so difficult not to avoid the half finished plans and dreams deferred?
Priorities in action. Are we as people given so many priorities that we become numb? Like telemarketing and email, have we been so inundated that we’ve forgotten how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to see clearly those actions and activities that will be provide their own energy for completion? Are we so inundated by irrelevant information we’re in a constant yet unconscious state of bewilderment?

Perhaps complex solutions come with simple answers. Don’t think, just do. Now the call seems to imply a return to “thoughtless action”. Not the thoughtless action that led to the Megan Meier tragedy, nor the thoughtless action that led to the George Tiller madness, but the thoughtless action that led to the works of da Vinci and Shakespeare. It’s easy to wonder how such unquestioned genius could be described as thoughtless; truly their chefs-d’oeuvre required some intellectual heavy lifting, but I can’t help but think that the remarkable feature is the absence of thought in the way that we’re accustomed. Missing is the self-doubt and distraction, gone are the questions of capacity, yet even the most untrained eye cannot miss the fingerprints of urgency. Works of any great magnitude, whether in our lives or the lives of acknowledged Masters, are created because they simply have to be. They’re ideas which, once created, are complete with their own imperative.

How then, can everything be work of such magnitude? How can we assure that the activities we undertake are of highest caliber and are completed with their own energy, as opposed to requiring our finite stores? The new pressing question, and one which will receive thorough treatment in musings to come. For the time being, let us say that the quality of our creations and our lives will rise in direct connection with the urgency which our creations have for us. It requires living the life we have to lead, rather than the one we think we do or the one we think we should.

So try being the person you have to be, be the change you wish to see in the world, act as though you were already the person you are in your purest, wildest, fiercest dreams. Consider, what do you simply HAVE to do?