Nothing Has Life Except The Incomplete

Given any opportunity, I would call myself a complex person.  I have deep thoughts, educated opinions (on some things), and a way of wording these thoughts and opinions that makes me sound worthy of someone’s attention.  Yet I find myself very uninteresting these past few weeks.  I have nothing to think about, nothing to say that I could say with any real confidence in my listener’s interest.  So here I am, twenty-five days after my last post, indulging myself in wondering why.

It isn’t that I haven’t been motivated to work.  I’ve written dozens of pages in my various writing projects, and work progresses in my music, as well.  When it comes to my blog, however, the record of my deep thoughts and intelligent opinions, I’ve got nada.  Why?

I’ve been going through some of my old journals, recently, and in one of them is page after page of insightful contemplations on nature, my relationships, and the world in general.  There are dozens of them, dated within days of one another.  True, these written musings were assignments for a class, but we had no prompts, and I don’t remember ever struggling to find something to write.  Three times a week, sometimes more, there was something that inspired me, something that I wanted to remember, to think about--for example, is it a good thing that we can perceive differences between human faces and features?  What does my name mean, and what does that meaning mean for who I am, if anything?  Why do we call it "falling" in love?  And this was four years ago, at the beginning of a college education meant to make me more complex and insightful.  What does it mean that I don’t have anything to say now?

The only variable that seems to matter is environment.  Back then, I was introducing myself to the Hollins community, which is known for its creativity and open-minded acceptance of all kinds of opinions.  Surrounded by intelligent people, all seeking their own answers to hundreds of questions, I couldn’t help but seek on my own, even if I didn’t know what questions to ask. 

Now, heaven forbid that I imply my family is not intelligent.  My parents, my brothers and sisters, they are all brilliant people, with their own feelings and thoughts on the world.  But I can’t help but shake the sense that for me, this is a place of answers and not of looking for them.  This is home; it is a destination, not a stop on the journey.  So while my creativity remains untouched, I don’t feel the need to dig deeper.  I don’t need to think about myself or my world, because this familiar place gives me a comfortable picture of both.

I don’t really want to be comfortable, though.  I want to search, to agonize, to fret and rejoice and contemplate what is within and without.  I want to question myself, and I want some of those questions to go unanswered.  Yeats was right: to have life, we need to be incomplete, because that is what makes us move, makes us question, makes us glow.