Novelty

I’ve been thinking a lot about novelty, and how lately I rarely feel like I’m living a life that’s imbued with it; this is both ironic and sickening. Every day something deep down inside of me burns and cries out for innovation, and every day that flame gets stomped out by the mundanity and monotony of modern life. More often than not, I feel stifled. Like I'm being smothered, like I am a physical embodiment of the fig tree Sylvia Plath describes in The Bell Jar: 

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Scratch the lines about a husband and children and there’ya go. The figs are falling, doors are closing, time is ticking, and what do I have to show for my life? Like Mary Oliver says, I want to be married to amazement, but that feels impossible when society is constantly stage whispering directly into my face, our faces.  Unless you're _____, unless your life looks like ______, unless you achieve _____, unless you have a savings, a 401k (does anyone know what that really means?), or a mortgage and a marriage that allows you to settle down in the burbs and have three kids, then your life has no worth.  

I am reluctant to admit that more often than not, I fall victim and I internalize this voice. I end up comparing myself to the person I think I SHOULD be, to the life I think I SHOULD be living, and selling myself over to what people around me expect and it sounds a lot like, “You're not good enough. You don't do enough. You’re not living a life that society has deemed successful because over and over again you stray and reject the blueprint by coloring outside of the lines. 

I constantly feel like I am being subtly and silently forced to pledge a blind allegiance to a life of stagnation, repetition, and dank submission. Work, sleep, try to pay bills, go home, walk the dog, wake up and do it all over again. I think people who live for the weekend are absolutely insane, and yet, what am I doing? You need health insurance. You have student loans you’ll never be able to pay off. You have medical bills. You have an illness. All of your peers and friends are focused on getting coupled, falling into a routine, settling down, having babies. What are YOU doing Hope? While nothing is wrong with this lifestyle, it often makes me wonder where do I fit in? And the truth is, I don't. And I don't want to. 

I never want to be complacent. I never want to settle. I never want to follow “the path” because that's what I’ve been spoon fed or told to do. I’d rather question, explore, and push the boundaries by finding my own way, even if that means suffering. Because even then, at least I FEEL something. I’d rather seek to understand. To struggle. To know that I am alive. I want to lay down at night grateful for the opportunity to have fully used my body and brain for goodness.  

I don’t want to live a cookie cutter life. I don't want to “fit in.” If belonging means losing my sacred authenticity, accepting a life of conformity, and unexplained rules that lead to complacency, then I don't want it. I am not a machine created to make money, pay my bills and die. I am not a cog in the wheel. 

I am withering. Being held hostage to paperwork, a time clock, health insurance; living merely for a paycheck, and two weeks off a year is a terminal cancer diagnosis for my soul. 

I think about novelty and how it brings us to life. How it generates ideas, sparks growth, develops new synapses and neural pathways, how it breeds creativity, relationships, wonder and awe. I think about how the antithesis of novelty is conformity. And sadly, I realize that I’ve spent the majority of my life trying to blend in. I now know that forcing myself to blend in is what makes me feel the most isolated, the most unsettled, the most misunderstood. The harder I try, the more disconnected and alone I feel. Nothing resonates with me more than the Jack Kerouac quote:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

Mary Oliver also says, “Leave some room in your heart for the unimaginable.” But what if selfishly I want more than just room? What if I want to live there? 

I’ve never known a deeper, more patient love or consistency than I have been shown this past year while in the depths of my illness. And yet, as healing as that love has been, in a twisted way, I still find the deepest parts of me aching and yearning for spontaneity and the unknown. Something more is out there. And I need to go find it. 

I don’t need things. I need deep, contemplative conversations, nature, and to be surrounded by dreamers, by others who reject the common narrative and set out in search of something more. So often I feel like a caged animal here. “This is the way to wellness and wholeness and freedom,” society says. Yet I look around and all I see are tired eyes, capitalism, unfulfilled, unhappy consumers, melting ice caps, parking garages, smog, spam mail, illness, and the absence of humanity. Everywhere around us I see the signaling and message to conform, to settle, to deaden.

“Where did that person’s spark go?” I often wonder. “At what point was it finally choked out of them?” As adults, we often forget the sacred art of play and we lose the ability to explore and dream.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. 

We celebrate the poetry and rapture of lines like Kerouac’s, and we hang them on our fridge as a distant reminder of the life we long to live. 

Yet without fear, without uncertainty we will never know the depths of ourselves or what we are capable of. We cannot be reborn. Therefore, we forever remain embedded in the safety of our cocoon. We forgo learning to fly.

Nietzsche says, “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

Well, I refuse to relinquish the flame. I won’t go quietly. Instead I will rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

I hope that this is your sign, your calling, to follow the music that will lead you to the reverent, to the rapturous. May we all be brave enough to answer the call.