I’ve been taking more baths lately. I retire to the tub with a couple of books and my iPad and I try to focus on the former and ignore social media on the latter.
It’s getting harder and harder, but I try.
As I am typing this, we are waking up to Pentecost Sunday in an America ravaged by the twin plagues of COVID and police violence. Last night, cities were on fire. Chicago, my beloved home, was on fire.
How do we find the space to create something new in a world like this? What is the point?
As I am typing this, the bath is filling up again. I am going to retreat for a while, from my family, from my anxieties, from [gestures wildly] all of this. I am going to look for some balance in my body, and in my soul.
I recognize this is a great privilege.
I started taking more baths when the shelter-in-place orders went out for the city. At first, it seemed decadent. Later, as my body erupted with new and unexpected aches, it seemed more like a necessity.
Today, I think it’s an escape.
I heard somewhere that Douglas Adams, author of my favorite mis-labeled trilogy, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, took a lot of baths. He used it as a means of coping with his constant and gnawing writers block. That makes native sense to me. A bath is the most wonderful of beards - it is a completely private rejuvenation that benefits from the cover of being a means of personal hygiene.
Nobody can blame you for just wanting to be a little more clean.
The voices in my head tell me that the time I take to write and do other creative activities is inherently selfish.
For many years, that voice kept me from doing those things. I believed it was more noble to leave projects unfinished, rather than take the space and time away from pedestrian activities to get them finished.
The selfishness of the creative act is balanced against the selfless aspects of it. The world needs ideas. The world needs beauty. Especially now.
So I have had that Midnight Oil song in my head all day. The only one that really made a dent here in the states: Beds are Burning. I don’t even like the song, if I’m honest. But today, I think it asks the right questions.
How can we dance while our earth is turning?
How can we sleep while our beds are burning?
We are waking up to centuries of unfinished business. We are waking up to the illusions that the institutions—like the police and the government—that some of us thought were there to protect all of us, were in fact only there to protect a very few of us.
We are waking up to a world of pain and disruption. It’s devastating.
I am not a morning person, and waking up is hard. But here we are.
So we are waking up to the need to create something new. Something different.
We are waking up to the need to create something that will engage and uplift more of us, all of us.
I don’t know what it looks like, but I know a part of it is in me, and in you, and in them—near the surface, or deep down.
We need to dig, and believe, and create.
We feel blocked. We don’t know where to start. We feel tired.
We take a bath. We restore. We begin again.
Despite all evidence, we begin again.
Breathe. Bathe.
Build.
Build again.
And when you build, build strong.