Two Worlds

Here is the rub: the freedom, beauty, and degree of life we experience while creating something new can not be sustained. We must come out of Narnia. We must return to our “normal” lives. This, and the transitions that ensue, can be quite difficult.

For most, the greater the high in creating equals the greater the low in exiting. Time spent in that creative headspace — true space that is very real and very good, can feel like a distant memory or fairy tale dream. Once out, there is no way back in.

Or so it can seem. When in, there is no desire to leave. But we can’t stay. Can we? It begins to feel like we must choose a reality. This one or that? Like there is no way to live in and out of both. Yet that is precisely what must happen.

Both worlds are required.

And perhaps there is no such thing as perfecting the transitions in and out. We awkwardly stumble and trip our way through the in-between doors trying to figure it out.  We usually feel like we are spending too much time in one place of the other.    

Many can not take the challenge of going in and out. Some force themselves to pick one world or the other (and get “stuck” there). The ones who get trapped in the creative inner world start to deteriorate from the inside out and lose all touch with the “outside.”

What used to inspire soon only addicts. The outside world turns into a distraction.   

The one who gets trapped on the outside tries to systematically eliminate their inner world and in the process lose any sense of wonder about it. Folks here can become so efficient about life that its practicalility becomes ominously meaningless.

Their own competance becomes suffocating. There is no mystery left.

Either way we lose. When we try to cope by choosing only one world, the other doesn’t go away. Sooner or later, thankfully, that other world and its realities infiltrate our condition. We know we are missing something fundamental to being human.

Creatives working without inspiration or people swearing off longing are both equally sad affairs.

Though the challenge of going between worlds is great, the wonder and community that result are worth it. That is the bottom line: it is worth it! Keep coming. Keep going. This is the creative life. The back and forth is the magic. The wonder. The love. These two realities of the world we see and the world we don’t.

Both exist simultaneously. Both require attention and focus. Both are necessary and alone can not define us.  “Sow your seed in the morning” (says the disenchanted poet), and at evening let your hands not be idle” (Eccl. 11.6).  Whoa! “For you do not know which will succeed.”

The different parts of the day represent both worlds. In the morning the internal world, full of longing and prayers for a future not yet realized: the quiet hope of the invisible world. The day, then, is for work. The evening, yet even more hard work in the visible world.

All, as the poet says earlier, because we don’t know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in the womb, or the work of God (v.5). We simply can not make things grow. But we are certainly responsible to sow and reap so they can.

Do only what only you can do! You got this…