Life is a Bouncy Castle. Inflate it.

A couple of days ago last year I was close to leaving Malawi, and in a blog about adventure I wrote this:

“Adventure: ‘hazardous and exciting activity in unknown territory’ – isn’t that what life is?”

And reading that makes me a bit sad now. Not because I think I was foolish then, but because I think that this year I have slowly, gently, proved myself wrong. Life is not always “hazardous and exciting activity in unknown territory”. Sometimes it is and we have no choice about it. But other times, which is most of the time, it’s up to us. This thought has been creeping up on me for about a week now:

I have not been disciplined enough to remain free.

I wrote something ages ago about watching a drummer drum – and how years and years of practice and discipline had given him this incredible freedom to express himself on the kit. And the other day I saw a quote that says the same thing about dancing on my mate Andy Mort’s blog:

“The dancer is realistic. His craft teaches him to be. Either the foot is pointed or it is not. No amount of dreaming will point it for you. This requires discipline, not drill, not something imposed from without, but discipline imposed by you yourself upon yourself. … Your goal is freedom. But freedom may only be achieved through discipline. In the studio you learn to conform, to submit yourself to the demands of your craft, so that you may finally be free.”

Martha Graham (on sheepdressedlikewolves.com/dont-want-freedom)

Freedom can only be achieved through discipline – and this is the thing that I’m realising – I have got lazy, and it has cost me a big chunk of my freedom.

If I just do whatever I feel like doing, or whatever I need to do, all the time, my life ends up a little bit flat and grey. Not entirely – because sometimes I get restless and I want to do something interesting, so I do, and sometimes the things I need to do just happen to be exciting and meaningful and marvellous. But still, on the whole, my day-to-day existence tends to get a bit like a bouncy castle when they’ve started letting the air out. And what’s worse, I don’t notice that it’s leaking. I don’t notice that it’s not as bouncy as it once was because the air goes out slowly, and I get used to it bit by bit. As they always say, a frog will happily sit in a pan as you boil it to death as long as you heat the water gradually.

Moving swiftly away from that thought, the thing is that I have been alerted to the slight flatulence of the bouncy castle that is my life since I came home for the summer by the necessity of constantly answering the question, “How’s uni?”, and also thinking about this time last year, and how desperate I was to keep living an adventure when I got home.

It turns out that living freely in this country, in this context, requires discipline. I read a really interesting thing the other day that said that we always think of the Ten Commandments as restricting, because they tell us what we can’t do. But actually, even besides from all the stuff about Jesus and forgiveness, that’s a silly way to think about it because freedom doesn’t come from there being no constraints – that’s like a painter moaning that he only ever gets to use red, yellow and blue, or a songwriter complaining that she’s forced to work with these same twelve notes every day. Instead, freedom comes when we achieve mastery over our constraints. Creativity is discovering the utmost potential in the combination of our limitations and our materials’. And in the same way as creativity in art only comes when the artist has the persistence, the commitment and the self-control to master her materials; creativity in life is only possible when we put the effort in to master our materials, our constraints and limitations, and choose to use them to their fullest potential.

They always say about writer’s block: just put something on the page. Every day. That’s the way to be creative. It’s not some magic spirit that you need to catch, or that is mystically out of your control. As that dancer says: “freedom may only be achieved through discipline. … you learn to conform, to submit yourself to the demands of your craft, so that you may finally be free.” And I’m convinced that that is true of life. It takes discipline and obedience and effort to become finally free. I have to keep putting something on the page even when I can’t be bothered, pushing myself to live more lovingly, more creatively, more intentionally.

So, I suppose, let’s see how this year goes.