Nothing Hurts?

I had the good luck this weekend of catching up with a number of old friends. The kinds of friends who are happy to chit-chat about interesting, meaningful things–even if it’s been months (or years?!) since last you spoke. And it struck me today that one of the reasons I tend to feel like I’m just a visitor in the various places we’ve lived might be because the majority of people around me are pursuing goals wildly divergent from mine, or have beliefs and values only tangentially related to mine. More often than not, I feel like a stranger, an alien even, living in a cage in the midst of the zoo of humanity.

That sense was heightened by our movie night selection this week: “Birdman“. We’d had the BluRay in our to-watch pile for more than two years. I hadn’t realized until tonight just how long the list of awards was that it had won–including 2015’s Oscar for best picture. The movie earned every single one of them. It was in some sense as shockingly out of place in the Hollywood system as what I described of myself earlier. The movie was also nothing like anything I’d expected when we pushed play. It pokes at the lines between madness and sanity, artistry and banality, age and youth, and so many other so-called dichotomies and leaves you feeling like whatever your particular brand of suffering is, there are so many others sharing their unique pain with the world that none of us is truly as alone as we might feel.

It was, in short, the kind of movie that opens up conversation and closeness and introspection. Where I’d seen “Michael Keaton” and “dark comedy” and thought this might be in the “Beetlejuice” direction, I got a think piece that reminded me to reach out to my friends.

Tonight, then, I saw that Pentatonix had released a version of John Lennon’s Imagine. Their rendition strangely summarized my mindset:

As you might imagine, working (the day job) and talking once again derailed any effort at creativity. At some point I’m going to have to force myself into action, whether I feel ready or rested or not. In the meantime, we are at least walking quite a bit. My phone says I averaged 6,640 steps daily this week, and today I managed over 5 miles between the two long walks with the dogs and walking in circles through the house while I was talking on the phone.

I’m down to the final month of this round of ROW80, and so far I’ve been almost the epitome of anti-productive. My day job has gotten more intense, and somehow this year the summer cycle of social activities has been more distracting than normal. While I hope this week is more productive, I’m reminded of the adage that “hope is not a strategy,” and will be pushing myself harder to find and maintain the focus that has allowed me to finish drafting my stories. In the meantime, I encourage you to see how the others in my group are faring. I’ll be back next week to report on my progress.