no reason to wait

As busy as I am, I often feel that I am waiting for the angel of creativity to swoop down and say Hi, check out this amazing idea I have for you. But for the past few months, there has been no angel sighting. Even though I say I am waiting for it, I am secretly a bona fide expert at keeping it far far away.

You can do it too and here’s how: stay very busy.

If you are anything like me, you have a deeply ingrained certainty that your art is who you are. If you stay still long enough to start a new project, there is this tiny chance that it will suck so, naturally, you avoid this at all costs.

This presents a problem for obvious reasons. As much as I talk about sitting down and writing every day — as an act of courage and defiance and as a way to have a voice — I have let myself down, and possibly you too, kind reader, as I have not practiced what I preach. After all, I’ve been busy. If there’s no time to practice or to write, then I’m off the hook. To this I often utter a silent Oh Well and do an invisible shoulder shrug.

But I have a story for you.

This past Friday night I was out to dinner in New Jersey with three of my best friends from college. The occasion was that one of these friends is getting married in August and this was her bridal shower and bachelorette party weekend. The four of us had traveled from Boston, London and Chicago to be together for the first time since 2008. We were at a kitschy Russian diner and our food had just come. I glanced around the table and thought to myself, isn’t it a miracle that we are all here? That five years have passed since graduation and we are all able to be at this table right now? (And would I still get to have this thought in, say, five more years, or fifty?)

As that idea briefly shifted in my mind, the thing I didn’t know was that an old friend of mine had just died, moments earlier. This was a person whom I had not talked to since our bar and bat mitzvahs, this person was not even my facebook friend. But this person — Jordan — was a piece of my life. To make an analogy, he was one of the pegs on the elaborate Lite-Brite board of my childhood. He and I had grown up beside each other, spent our young years in Hebrew school sitting at the same small checker-patterned kitchen table, making matzah and learning the story of Moses. Later on, every week during Hebrew school lunch break, with the other kids in our class, we played a ridiculously fun ball game with a name I can’t remember and had to be coaxed to come back to class by our frustrated teacher.

Jordan was not sick or old or injured. He was literally and tragically plucked from this earth. He was someone who added to the intricate color on the canvas of my childhood and innumerable others’, a light on a board that has now gone out.

I’m not sure if it is irony or coincidence that I, uncharacteristically, spent this entire weekend living fully in the moment and feeling grateful for such exquisite friends whom I rarely see. I did not hear the news of Jordan until I was on my way home.

To be honest, I did answer a myriad of emails this morning, but now, from my living room couch, I am taking the time to write this, to create something, because there is no reason to wait.

It is at moments like this, upon hearing the painful knock on the door, that we get the stabbing reminder that our friends and loved ones are not always going to be there, and that sometimes we do not get a heads up. This is why we must fight with all our heart against the busyness that calls us. It is why both of us, you and I, should sit down today and create something in the face of despair, why we should not let a day go by without letting in a little quiet, without calling a friend or sibling or parent and making sure they know how much we love them.

My heart goes out to Jordan’s family.