The Long Game

Do We Have to Win It?

I think it was my fourth grade teacher who first cautioned about “always” and “never.”

Photo by Daniel Romero on Unsplash

Mrs. Caldwell sought to dial back the elementary absolutism of my peers as we began to opinionate about our world: food preferences, beliefs about our skills at math or spelling, ideas about which books, movies, friends, and role model figures rated positively. We needed perspective to see the evolving, flexible universe at the other end of our learning. She knew fourth grade is much too early for certainty.

Memorizing times tables, grammar rules, or elementary standards for popularity is not for everyone. Math gets more interesting. Grammar underpins creativity. Media and the people and activities that entertain us seem constantly to evolve. Our world has room for many and more ways of being.

Far from fourth grade, I’m still stumbling on people and ideas that disrupt my comfortable convictions. Aren’t we all?

So maybe adulthood - middle, or even old age - is also too soon for us to be pinning ourselves down. Life is a long game, a ride that can feel sometimes exhausting or dull, but also twisty, unpredictable, satisfying, even magical.

Of course, sometimes it’s terrible. Unwinnable.

Despite the wonders of spring/summer, and the joys of graduation season, reunions, weddings, vacations, new ventures, we’re surrounded by quite a lot of divisive focus on conflict, cynicism, pain. Old, unresolved hurts. Present fractures.

But when we center fear, brokenness, defeat, or distress, it’s all too easy to harden ourselves around perceived certainties about how things should go, forgetting there’s always more ahead. The unanticipated. Change. Some things we’ll win; some that we’ll lose.

As much as I like what I like, openness to new ideas and experience serves to flex a creative muscle. And it prevents stuckness or defeat from hanging around overlong.

Creativity grows from facing our questions, our unknowing.

Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash

When we explore and discover the potentialities of tomorrow, we unfold to something new. As much as it feels easier to have some predictable all nailed down and resolved today, we can’t. And it’s GOOD that we can’t.

I find these thoughts from Author/Artist/Scientist Jess Keating super helpful:

If you’re an intelligent, analytical, or generally thoughtful person, you might fall into the habit of leaning on your head a little more than your creative impulses....

And you know? I get it. Safety feels good — even if it’s just in our heads.

If you’re a creative person, you’re already operating in an uncertain arena. It’s already a scary path at times, so anything that makes us extra hungry for emotional shelter…we usually know when we’re being asked to drop the plan and open up to something different. Maybe something even better.

Nothing is promised in life, but when you’re working with creative ideas, the unknowability of it all can be shockingly hard to look in the eye. It can be tricky to step into that unknown terrain where your ideas may or may not pan out the way you’d like them. Because of this inherent tension, any semblance of a plan or strategy can feel like a life raft.

And that can be difficult to relinquish.

But letting go brings its own kind of magic, of course. And in the long game, we’re destined to let go and let go and let go. Nothing is assured. No certainty of plan or belief can keep us from living every hand dealt to us in our life’s contest. Win or lose.

So hang on, as you shift through seasons of sinking and freezing, falling and getting stuck, or awakening to wonder, beauty, success, and confidence. Fourth grade is long gone, but just as we moved past basic arithmetic and elementary favorites to manage more complex calculations and more evolved ideas, we’ll accommodate future waves of circumstance and opinion too. If we stay clear of hardened certainty and embrace openness, there’s something new, perhaps better, on the way.

Jess says:

But of course, you probably won’t know what “better” will look like, because it wasn’t something you ever anticipated. This is where you’ve got to lean less on your brain, and more on the creative animal of your body to know what to do next. This can take practice, but it’s a skill like any other.

It can be learned.

We’ve got time for that. Because we’re in this (life’s creative journey) for the long game.

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