Someone asked me recently about what it means to write or to be a writer. I am afraid I gave a very pompous and technical answer that did not answer the real question she was trying to grapple with. I should have said: "you are already writing and you are already a writer." Perhaps not with ink at the end but you are in a story and you are mostly making it up as you go along much like any book on any shelf of stories.
I should have said that the fascination for creativity can take away from many innate creative impulses and being focused too much on the way a book looks and feels and smells and sits on the shelf may rob you of the experience of reading the darn thing. The unexamined life, they say and perhaps rightly, is not worth living but neither is the over analyzed shadow of a life lived on hopes for the outside taste of things without the necessary joy in the inside flow of things. In short, it is far better to live than to wish you were living. Or put another way, it is a better preoccupation to apply yourself to the terrors and beauties of your own story than to wish you had a story. Of course you do. It is happening to you right now in many varied ways.
We live on a vain patch of the universe that is constantly elevating things out of proportion. We have eternity in our hearts so we constantly in the race to do immortal things. We are looking for relevance and power and security and purpose and that unique flavor of truth splattered on a thousand walls in a million cities:
“……waz here” or something to that effect. We all want to 'waz be here'. So we make writers, singers, actors, scientists, politicians and activists as demi-gods to validate the human experience. We elevate some so we can deflate others and seek that elevation to keep us away from the latter group. So we can matter and be waz here. This might all seem sensible and pleasant as a humanist view of that greater life of meaning but as a general rule of living it, is silly. A general rule for all life must apply to all life. A society of classes of people cannot have a general rule outside survival of the fittest. Winners and losers are the very rule of the game. Man has yet to devise a system of life that creates value for one without robbing some value, or sense of value, from others. It will always be a zero sum game. Except to the winner and his caste. They will all rely on evolution. They will all say the poor are all lazy and the cheated are all dumb and the powerless are all naïve. The one that has his value taken is deserving of the loss. He was not a writer or singer or actor or genius or hard worker or leader. He was weak. He "waz not here."
This is not true. It may make us all sleep at night and not encounter the guilt of success but we have to give logic a holiday to truly believe that life is fair and people the world over get what they deserve.
I am a Christian because in Christ I find the ultimate counter-argument to the fallacy of success is good and by the way success is…
If God came to earth in the form of a tribesman to a group under the boot of an empire, uninspired, flailing, much invaded and much hated, what does that tell us about our worship of overt success? If he chose a carpenter and a maiden to raise him in relative poverty what does that portend for my ideas of generational wealth? If he did little until his thirtieth birthday and did everything for all time in three short years after what does that say of our worship of youth and our struggle for old age? If he died like a criminal, never had any money, did not command the respect of everyone who met him or left undisputed what does that say of our love of legacy and of comfort, of validation and vindication?
A correct appraisal of Christ leaves me with the scary notion that all the things I have been told about the general rule of living add up to a house built on sand. It cannot withstand the coming storm of eternity that makes everything new.
There is a life that is life. There is a book that is being written. We are all writers. It is not for the vain or the accomplished or the haughty. These things pass. It is for those we ache for something else. The life advertised in the most beautiful and horrific moments in life, it tells us of the beauty of orange tinted sunrises and the tragedy of murder: it says there is more and there must be more at the same time.
By Forri Banu.
