| Subject: Re: creative exhaustion |
Author:
Paul
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Date Posted: 18:54:43 03/21/01 Wed
In reply to:
Gill
's message, "Re: creative exhaustion" on 13:47:45 03/21/01 Wed
Hi there you exhausted people. Here's another one. Let's down on the porch for awhile. Last September I was really struck in this area by one of Ted's essays, the Jigsaw Puzzle one, where he poses a little model about a person being this collection of jigsaw puzzle pieces that aren't connected in the way puzzle pieces should ultimately be. Instead they are configured more of like a constellation of puzzle pieces, at various levels of aggregation, spread out over some imaginary card table. Ted's model, if I recall it correctly, was that the collection of all of these pieces makes up the total sense a person has of themselves. Pieces of history, images, fears, ideas, and so forth. Name a piece. Some are consious pieces, many many are unconscious. This constellation of a person, at various levels of aggregation and disaggregation is held together simply by great relentlessly applied personal energy, unconsciously applied, to keep it all together and not having any parts go spinning away. For if a part goes spinning off the table onto the floor, well hell, that's part of me. Better keep that sucker under my thumb.
And then, when through grace or this Process, or whatever the Mystery is, a person suddenly begins to sense or intuit the level of effort they are expending to hold "themselves" together, trying to keep their configuration under control. Clutching onto pieces, taping together the ones that they feel need to be taped together. Whatever image of this model that works for you. The level of energy required to hold this puzzle constellation together is enormous, in fact, it is completely exhausting and frankly just wears a person out. It is simply, totally consumptive.
And when and if one begins to really see what they are doing to themselves, when they begin the see the fruitlessness of trying to artificially hold this whole configuration together, they have the choice available to them to just choose to let it all go, to relax, to let the pieces fall where they may. Enough already.
Then I think the sense of exhaustion floods in as all that tension and pressure is released, to whatever degree its released. It's like someone who has all their life been swimming against some greater current, and now just gives up and lets the current take them. And they lay on their back floating, suddenly feeling the exhaustion of all those miles and miles of swimming against the current, propelled through all that ardor by whatever was propelling them, keeping them going, driving them. I am suddenly mixing images here, but there is clearly a sense of release alongside such an exhaustion.
For me, this was an very powerful set of images in my process. I looked at myself and said "what the hell have I been doing to myself?" "What pieces am I manically holding onto?" And I am finding that the exhaustions, as it were, just keep coming and coming. A lifetime of body stress
working its way out. The body demanding its time in court. Piles and piles of exhaustion. I don't expect to reach the bottom for a very long time, if at all.
A long time ago I was on a teacher training course for TM,
and we had a guy on our course who was a cab driver in Chicago as a vocation, night shift, years of long, late hours. This was a three month course and that guy's contribution to the course was that he slept through the whole thing, just trying to catch up, even a little.
I am tired, and I think I will go to bed now.
Paul
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