A Spate

A Spate (1,247)

August 23rd, 2011

Monday should not look like Tuesday.

This may be the most profound piece of advice I can give. After all, the quality that destroys the human spirit is repetition—causing us to believe that settling down and falling into a pattern is the definitive sign of maturity.

Many of you reading this essay have a job where repetition is not only valued, but extolled as the preferable pattern of behavior. I totally understand this. That’s why it’s important that you take every single fragment of time that belongs to you and use it with selected diversity. Because this is surely a fact: Evil has one goal—to impede creativity.

Once creativity is stalled in human expression, we pretty much perform all necessary atrocities on ourselves—those which lead to our own boredom and eventually our relative decimation. If I were in charge of evil (which, by the way, I’m not) I would campaign for normalcy and encourage people to be as calm and settled as possible. For that amount of repression in and of itself causes human beings to feel deprived, which eventually lends itself to some form of depravity. Yes—if you feel deprived, you eventually will end up depraved.

That’s why it’s important to look at life in spates—chunky moments that we focus our dreams and aspirations upon, creating a climate of our own fancifulness. Without this, we get on the treadmill which immediately informs us that we’re going nowhere or just to a very-well-assigned destination. Yes, a treadmill is exhaustion—with no change of scenery.

True satisfaction is about grabbing spates of time.

Monday should not look like Tuesday. Otherwise, Wednesday will resemble Thursday and then Xerox a depressing Friday, hatching a Saturday when we lament how short our weekend is, culminating in a Sunday, where we feel guilty for not going to church or wonder if we should have gone fishing instead of hymn-singing, depositing us back on Monday—scurrying once again on the hamster wheel.

Here are three suggestions from this humble traveler:

1. Give your days a name and a purpose. In other words, Monday becomes “my workout day.” Tuesday is when I pull out my old writings and work on a journal. Wednesday is email day—to contact old friends on a weekly basis, and so forth and so on. You will never smother creativity if you give her air—and creativity is granted breath by being granted the opportunity to do something different every single, fresh day.

2. Don’t misdiagnose boredom. Boredom is a sign from your spirit and emotions that you are ignoring the better parts of yourself. Don’t slap yourself and pretend you should fake interest in something when you don’t actually have any intrigue. Allow yourself the luxury of being invested in what you do. This is why it’s sometimes necessary to say no. Some of the best times in my life are when people have insisted that we “should all go out and do something” and I have remained behind, to spend quality time with my own creative being.

3. Never criticize—exhort. When we start comparing our lives to other people’s—especially favorably—self-righteousness enters our existence, causing us to believe that whatever we do is enough instead of challenging our horizons to pursue more, be more, believe more and share more. There are only two people I compare my life to at any given time. First, my own best, and secondly, Jesus. If my present actions do not measure up to my best, I laugh at my own inadequacy and challenge myself to pursue a better angle. And if I feel good about my best, I then compare it to the lifestyle, intensity, intelligence and integrity of Jesus. That’s usually sufficient to keep me busy. It is not enough for me to supersede the efforts of Joe Schmoe. Otherwise I will find myself being judgmental of my brother instead of uplifting him and motivating him by the example that I provide.

It’s all about what you do with your spate of time. If you believe that life is supposed to meld into a big clump of cheese, then you will never understand the true milk of human kindness.

Monday should not be like Tuesday. I don’t care where you are in your life or what you’re doing—diversify your efforts to give oxygen to your creativity.

This will give purpose to your spirit, joy to your emotions, ideas to your brain and a spring to your step.