I’ve been running the TV show “Numb3rs” in the background for a little noise while I paint. Somewhere back in season two, while painting a city scene canvas, episode seven popped up and caught my eye. In it, the character Charlie (a mathematician whiz who helps the FBI) realizes he hasn’t done any “new work” in a long time. While he has been doing great work and great things in helping the FBI and working in new ways with math, and is busy teaching and working, he realized he hadn’t done anything  big and original and new. And so, at the conclusion of the show, he begins work on a complicated new theory and it becomes a running plot arc through the next seasons.

That certainly distracted me.

I haven’t done anything new. I should be doing something new.

It’s not about not doing any new paintings. I’ve probably been painting more now than ever, and it’s been mainly to make rent. But I’ve not done anything new, not anything large or consuming or requiring of a long-dedicated effort complete or free from the undercurrent of “make something that sells because you need money.” No project or creation or grand something or other, nothing that doesn’t stand a chance of being sold, nothing daring or crazy. I’ve become distracted by the daily bread-and-circus involved in the easily-acquired habit of trying to make a living, and I just don’t want to create some new thing that no one wants and that I have to push around in either my apartment or in my head.

Everything must earn its keep, I guess, even my art and writing. No more freeloading.

Somehow, my life became one of how to pay bills and not miss rent. That’s it. I, for all intents and purposes, stopped doing things simply for enjoyment and inspiration; I’ve focused solely on things that will bring in calculable income. Nothing more. If it doesn’t bring in income, I feel guilty for wasting my time. That is the definition of the daily grind and it is the state of being, I think, for many of us. It’s the obvious solution to what seems to be the obvious problem: we have to make a living. It isn’t ignoble to earn a living, nor are we able to escape the seasons in our life when that necessarily takes the largest chunk of our time. However, there is a danger to perpetuating our existence being our sole reason for existence.

Oh, there were leaps I took in my mid-20′s and early 30′s — a silly NaNo novel, learning to play the violin, karate, flying — but not in the past few years.  Nothing new, just a sickly numb day-to-day routine. And my mind is almost completely shut off, because there isn’t anything that really demands it to be otherwise. The daily grind doesn’t require much thought. Instead of turning my thoughts towards something that is so wild and crazy that it just might blast me out of the rut, something that would be freeing even if it were a freeloader, I instead use my mind for grumbling about my current situation and fixating on what I don’t have and what I’m not. I’m bitter about having required all the enjoyable things to find a place on a spreadsheet or get out of the way.

I should be better, be smarter, be more successful, be healthier, be achieving more, be thinner, I think. The things I’m not are the things, somehow, that would make me a more productive human being. I am aware there is something not quite right in that trap of thinking. I often tell people to let go of the “shoulds” because of their sometimes destructive power in perfectionists, but maybe I should concentrate more on the “be” part of the equation. To be or not to be is, after all, the question. Not be followed by a qualifier — better, smarter, richer, funnier — but just be. Be, without constantly pushing toward a “better” be. Be, without throwing out the things that don’t bump you up a notch in life and mindlessly focusing on the ones that do. Is it possible to just be, and let the freeloading things in life have a place, too?

I’m still trying to think of a Big Thing, some giant freeloading project that is exciting and enjoyable, and convince myself that in the middle of all my busy-ness and focus on earning money and fear of the next month’s bills, that there are reasons to take time and do something that may have absolutely no financial payoff in the end.

To just be content with being, so that I can do the new things that take leaps of faith that the daily grind won’t allow, the things that are actually the stuff that life is made of. Until I’m content with just being, I’ll never be anything new. The daily grind never gets a person anywhere but worn down.

Maybe the whole point isn’t about catching the fish, but that having your head underwater for so long that it forces you to come up for air and re-evaluate.

The thought has come to me — never mind the path it took to get here — that I haven’t done anything new for a while.

Not that I haven’t been painting or such things, but I haven’t done anything “new.” I’ve been so busy with my head under the water of daily life, trying to catch the fish and pay my next bills and exist and do all things in a manner that brings in income, that I have created a situation of drowning.

Nothing new, never coming up for air.

In an email to an acquaintance, about this subject, I said:

New, as in an outside-of-the-typical-daily-life Big Project — that’s what I meant. For example, in my early 20′s, I decided I should learn to play the violin. That was a Big Project, and I did (not a virtuoso, but OK for me). In my late 20′s, I decided I would like to learn Karate. Early-mid 30′s, it was learning to fly an airplane. It’s usually something out of my comfort zone. [...]

My point is that periodically people (creatives? lifelong learners? haven’t worked it out yet) need to first imagine, then plan, then work, and then achieve a Big Project. Those distinct steps each serve a specific purpose in the person, a kind of way to flush the creative system clear. Educational, relational, artistic — again, it might be whatever it might be. Stagnation becomes dreariness in life, I think, for such people.

Over the past three weeks, several things have occurred which I have not shared on this blog or with many of my friends. Some were minor reminders of the actual difficulty of the Beatitudes and the place for humility, some were serious blows to my confidence, and others outright hurdles of real difficulty involving decisions that will have to be made one way or the other. All together, they remind me of the value of shocking things that jolt me out of the water into Big-Project, Big-Risk action out of desperation, if for no other reason.

“I’m not on the ‘40 Under 40‘ list,” I bemoaned to a friend, wondering again at the continued squalor of my professional life and if my path had been one of chasing the wrong thing all this time.

“Neither am I,” he said.

“I only  have three years left,” I replied.

“Do you want to be on the list?”

“I can’t really say.”

I don’t want to trade one fish for another; drowning is drowning. Come up for air, and try something new. Something Big.

The reader need merely select any story from the current crop of flood-related articles on the local newspaper’s website, and go to the comments accompanying it. You have your random religious nutter sprinkled in and about the commentary, and the rare level-headed writer who is endeavoring to provide factual information or encouragement.

But mainly?

Class envy.

Short floods rush in and provide for chaotic heroism. The devastation comes quickly, catching everyone off guard and not giving anyone a chance to think of reasons to not help or hate. People pitch in, become generous, and are able to maintain it for a short duration. Everyone gives everything, for it is a bit easier: it will only be for a short while. The water drops, and the next element of crisis, the cleanup, begins. The same thing happens. There is less time for grumbling. There is less time to over-think helping. There is no time to make it normal; it remains devastating.

The flood in Bismarck/Mandan has been going on since May. Read that again: SINCE MAY. It is now mid-July and it will not be abating any time soon, if you consider that the water is still very high and that the flood cleanup is still a long way off. I know that Minot has the national attention, but the flood here is a different animal entirely, one that slipped in just slowly enough to provide some triage preparation, but has still devastated large swaths of property and people. It changed the face of two seasons, and the geography, for the region. Can you imagine living temporarily out of your home for this many months, some without homes to return to possibly just before a North Dakota winter sets in?

Sadly, the mighty Missouri has been overflowing her banks long enough for it to become a kind of “normal” and allow people time to  start formalizing already-held grudges in terms of how they are to be interpreted through the lens of this flood. I sit and read the comments section of the paper, and listen to people talking (myself included), and realize that a long flood is a much different animal than a short flood. The immediate needs of humanity are lost to time and desensitization, the human face of personal tragedy is another dramatic above-the-fold photograph to be thrown out tomorrow, and the meat of it simply becomes a matter of who is going to pay and by god, I’m not going to see my taxes raised to help those people in those big fancy houses who were dumb enough to live by a river.

(Nearly all cities are built on rivers. Not all people affected had big fancy houses.)

How strange that a necessary component of human survival — a kind of absorption of the awful so that it became livable and normal — also hinders it. Callouses protect, because they keep us from feeling.

I can only imagine the conversation on Noah’s ark, a flood which was, oddly, shorter than the one still going on here and with far fewer angry animals.

Envy is ruinous.

We have more words to describe the room a toilet is located in than we do for the different kinds of love, or how we feel when facing abject loss. There are times to be silent . There are times we speak best in other ways. But in some moments, we have to express something for our own benefit of giving a name to what is happening inside.

A good poet might leap into that no-man’s land and return with a collection of common words that, though not saying the thing we cannot say, talks around and about it in a way that we immediately recognize as true. It’s the poem that seems so simple and obvious a solution to the problem of saying “this is how I feel!” that we are amazed we could not write it ourselves.

A musician might try to express what cannot be said in words through his music. I recently attended an organ recital with a friend and heard Durufle’s Prelude on the Name A.L.A.I.N., Op.7 for the first time. Through his music, Durufle was trying to express how he felt about the death of his friend and fellow composer, Jehan Alain, who died during WW2. Durufle could have told us in words, maybe, about Alain’s interest in motorcycles and how that led to his involvement in the war, and maybe tried to put in some good memories he had of Alain, and he could have told us that he Alain’s death affected him, but he said nothing in words. He wrote a beautiful piece of music, instead, that replicated the frenetic energy of a motorcycle. He worked the alaphabet around Alain’s name and used the notes ADAAF in his composition. As I watched the performer’s fingers fly across the keys and the sound of the organ filled the church, I knew Durufle had skillfully captured the intertwined waves of grief and happy memory perfectly with no words at all.

In my own art, I sometimes try to say something more than just “this is a pretty picture for your wall.” Sometimes it is an obvious statement, as I explained to a friend during a recent dinner outing.

“Every artist has some kind of personal meaning in their art,” I said to him. “Some are more conceptual, more about the concept or idea than the visual representation, than others.”

I certainly won’t get into how and what artists are trying to express (or not express), in their art. I can only speak for myself and know how I try to hit, with color and the mechanics of brush across canvas, a certain target that I am unable to reach with words. It might not be a message to the viewer, but a way for me to figure out what’s going on inside. The process of the art itself somehow finds a detour around the language barrier, and draws it out of me like a wick. Instead of trying to describe how the fog engulfed the trees while driving through Washington, I might simply try to capture how I felt when I saw it by literally drawing it out on paper.

All these words to say, ironically, that there aren’t always the words to say it.

I have noticed a few things about a friend, very good and golden things far below the worn and bruised surface of life, and I find that it is like standing in front of a glorious sunset and struggling to say something much more meaningful than “it’s pretty” or “it’s orange.” It is at the periphery of understanding; it is knowing God is at work, making painful changes, and wishing I could see the finish so that I could say “don’t worry, it’s beautiful!” I would say something, try to encourage, but I cannot seem to find any words.

I am not a poet.

Never mind the usual cacophony of the day. Noise and bustle and “look at me!” all while I lie in bed in the dark waiting for sleep and silence.

It never seems to come. There is a riot when I crave peace.

The present is a circus; there are all kinds of clowns.

There is juggling and there are ringmasters and there are elephants in the room. We walk on tightropes that end up winding and binding and strung up and out. We are flung through the air when we are least ready and hope there is something to catch us if we fall as we grasp for the hands of hope and opportunity.

The trinkets to distract aren’t cheap, especially after we buy them; the price paid by the Ringmaster was even higher.

I get tired of the clowns, but I don’t want to stay in the stands and watch from a safer, quieter distance. My friend Charlie sent me an email of encouragement a few years ago, and included the well-known quote by Teddy Roosevelt from his “Citizen in a Republic” speech:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…

I’ve remembered that quote often, sometimes in the context that Charlie used it, and sometimes when…I get tired of the arena, the circus of now. I am reminded it doesn’t last that long, actually, and what I do during it matters.

The circus of now…is soon silent.