Living in the Credo

I’ve been asked to create a credo.

It’s for a writing workshop; you know, one of those lovely insulated experiences in life where you and a group of strangers reveal increasingly more intimate selections from your life and thoughts, the ones more commonly reserved for death bed confessions. Seriously, a writing workshop for me is usually a place of safety, discovery, and inadvertent therapy, where schools of unchecked prose and first drafts swim in hopes of finding new forms. A place where my I do my best to discard comparison, jealousy and self-loathing - and find them crawling out of wastebasket and following me home. A place where the worldly me crashes into the provincial, and produces instantaneous perplexity. I love writing workshops.

Back to the credo - ‘a system of principles and beliefs’ so the dictionary tells me. This should be easy: I’m a fairly consistent, reliable and well intentioned human being. Except when I’m not. Like just today I was supposed to be at a production meeting, and I always call if I’m going to miss or be late, but I had this headache, sort of a PMS-exhaustion thing where I was driving along thinking I was going to peuk, so I turned the car around, went home, and crawled into bed for a nap filled with guilty dreamlettes about irresponsible phone practices. That’s the efficient set of beliefs I hold in action.

Or how I hold patience and equanimity as the highest human virtues, and put forth a steady font of reasoned understanding and warmth, especially with my son, until the little troll inside him presses just the right buttons and I fall from the Bodhi Heights into Married With Children madness.

Let’s face it, I’m a messy human: my actions don’t always match the principles and beliefs, so I get confused. If I believe with my heart and soul that family and friends are the most important things, why do I find myself in a deep and personal relationship with my computer? Do I lack the full commitment to carry out a credo-bound existence and will my epitaph be ‘She was a Waffler’ ?

Maybe I get my beliefs wrong. Perhaps hiding under the easy answers, the ones gleaned from new age mantras and refrigerator affirmations, could be principles that actually guide my actions. Let’s see….

I believe in living each day. Most of the time this is accompanied by the phrase “to it’s fullest”, but I’m really more interested in just the living, as in getting through the day. And it’s not a downer for me: I just like the idea of quotidian philosophy that says ‘nothing special shall happen and that’s OK.” Sort of chop wood and carry water - but more like get to work and carry groceries.

I believe in destroying love - as it is currently advertised. Down with lipgloss moments and fawning adoration. Now that I’ve surged responsibly past the age for reckless romance, I like the idea of love as a dependable construct informing all relationships. It’s imperfect love, the kind that recognizes foibles and difficulties as the ground for possible growth and deeper interaction. That way ‘love thy neighbor’, ‘thy enemy’, and on most days ‘thy spouse’, become imperatives for understanding not desire.

I believe in dispelling delusions of contemporary culture. I want to shout loudly in the crack between ‘art’ and ‘commerce’ and find ways to illuminate them both with the multiple realities that constitute our world. There’s a

And lastly, I should mention I believe that interrelatedness is all. Relationships, connexity, interaction, causation, interconnectedness – all those lovely words govern every aspect of being and as I realize how every action, even thought, has it’s repercussions in my immediate world and the world at large, I can hold myself accountable for actions and also realize the immense complexity of all.

I should mention that I’m a closet Buddhist. See, here I go again, qualifying the nature of my beliefs, in fear that I can’t live up to them, but revealing myself as one less attached to a ideal reality goes a long way to maybe making all of this fit together in an understandable package. That way I can strive to ‘lessen suffering’ but know that I’m just as much caught on the wheel of existence as the next of our 6 billion friends and neighbors.

When it comes down to it, I can just resolve to be the best ‘messy human’ that I can be. Beliefs and principles can dance above the clouds in Platonic ideation, and when I take them down they can immediately become sullied copies of the originals that they once were. The pursuit of perfection can be realized as the impossibility it is and shelved once and for all, and life can be lived in the moment. I know – ‘in the moment’ – is the overused answer of the decade, but for the mixed up, multifaceted, overloaded life I seem to lead, there’s hope in just staying where I am.

What does this mean for writing? Well that’s another essay that I would normally attempt to write in the last 5 minutes before leaving the house, and then take too much time to complete, and be late and take other peoples time…so it’ll just have to wait for next week.

I believe in the paradox of living. Now that can go on my refrigerator and stay there.