Yesterday was a nice day. I read, wrote in my journal, played the piano, made art, listened to music, played games, spent relatively little time on the internet, and felt overall rather good. But, in spite of all the niceness going on around me, I couldn't shake off that feeling that I should be doing something more "productive." I check my bank account again and feel the anxiousness for fiscal stability creeping up and suffocating my ability to relax and enjoy life. I express these concerns to a family member and they reply, "Then get a job." They make it sound so easy. In the past, it always was.
There are a few books I've been reading lately that have been helping me through this particularly discombobulating state of being. The first of those is Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water, which I had to read once in college and was recently recommended to me as a valuable re-read. L'Engle, who passed away last September and was most famous for her "children's" novel A Wrinkle in Time, which I read several times and deeply adored as a child, uses the 240 pages of Walking on Water to explore the tenacious question of what it means to be a Christian artist. Though I don't always agree with everything L'Engle says in this book, and though I find some of her many digressions to be rather confusing, distracting, or simply unnecessary, I'm reassured and chastened by her reminder that taking time to "be" is not only admissible, it's strongly advisable, and should certainly not be regarded as a waste of time. She states,
A more subtle time waster is being bored. Jesus was never bored. If we allow our "high creativity" to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the supermarket. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song (108).
Along the same lines I found personal reassurance in Gabrielle Bell's graphic novel, Lucky. Bell recounts the tedium of unemployment, the torment of taking jobs modeling for art classes in order to make some quick, easy cash, and the accompanying feelings of uselessness and degradation. She then demonstrates how she uses the memory of these unpleasant emotions to cheer herself up later on. In one panel, she stands in an unmoving line, thinking, "I hate this! Wait a minute, I'm not modeling. Hey, this is kind of fun!" (9).
Again with the example of standing in line. I guess the image appeals to me because it's an effective microcosm of my situation in life right now. Somewhere up ahead in the future I see Japan and an exciting new life there. In the meantime, I'm waiting. And the more I focus on the wait, the slower it seems to go by.
Madeleine L'Engle says a lot about time: about the difference between twenty-four-hour-a-day chronos-time and the measureless kairos-time in which God dwells and in which we, as poets and saints, are called to dwell as well. I'm learning to focus more on the kairos, to pray and play the piano more often, to write stories and teach myself to juggle (seriously, I'm starting to get pretty good at it, too).
Lately I’ve been reading a lot about William Shakespeare. I recently finished Anthony Burgess’ imaginative biography and I’m now well into Stephen Greenblatt's own award-nominated study on the life of The Bard. It’s been fascinating. Throughout my formal education, I’ve had a guiltily unoriginal obsession (when people find out I’m a Literature major, I always feel like they want me to have a more unique response to the inevitable conversation provoker: “Who’s your favorite author?”) with Shakespeare. So I felt that now—over a year out of college and currently without full-time employment—was as good a time as any to make an invested effort in learning more about him as a person.
Despite being widely accepted as the greatest playwright of all time, Shakespeare “the man” remains largely an impenetrably equivocal figure. There just isn’t a lot of hard historical evidence about his personal life. As Burgess put it, “Infuriatingly, whenever Shakespeare does something other than buy a lease or write a play, history shuts her jaws with a snap.” As my recent readings have led me to discover, any detailed biography of the glover’s son from Stratford must rely heavily on speculation.
For instance, there is a period of Shakespeare’s life, between his leaving Latin Grammar School in the 1670s to his appearance in the London theatre scene in the early 1690s, about which we know close to nothing. Plenty of scholars like to speculate that he worked as a schoolteacher or a lawyer’s clerk (which would account for the professional familiarity with legal vernacular that he demonstrates in several of his plays), but we do know this much: he didn’t attend university, produce plays, or do anything of historical notability for over a decade.
Suddenly I feel an intimate connection with this mysterious genius from the past. It’s possible that, if anyone would forgive my lack of tangible productivity at this point in my life, Shakespeare would. I like to imagine him at my age: working odd jobs; studying up on classic literature, recent history, or whatever seemed to tickle his fancy; living with his parents (yes, Shakespeare likely lived with his parents following his shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway and before moving to London); listening to a lot of Mirah and Damien Rice on his iPod; looking forward to something greater.
I guess if Shakespeare had an awkward transitional phase in life, then I can have one, too. It has been all too easy to become frustrated by the books that warn me that no respectable graduate program will want to take me if I’ve spent more than a year or two out of college, or to see my peers already locked into life paths that I’ve yet to find the trailhead for; but at least I’m in good company.
