Doing the Things I Love, Whilst Trying to Pay the Bills

It’s one long wrestling match. Or perhaps a tug of war would be more apt.

This instant is a perfect encapsulation of the struggle. I am in that moment of morning tranquility. It is 7:30 a.m. as I sit at my desk with a lot of work ahead of me. I run a shoe business; I’ve done it half my life. The work requires great attention to detail, pragmatism, and focus. It does not require daydreaming and rumination, two of my favourite dispositions.

This little window before the December sun rises over the valley. I sip my first coffee of the day (the best by far), write in my journal, and reflect on the previous day and upon my life in general; this is a spell that I don’t want to break. It is the time in the day before the reality of running my own business and paying our eye-watering mortgage, take control of my cortex once more.

Within this fleeting minute, I allow myself to breathe deeply for the last time in the day. It is the time when I am most aware of the sensory world, when I take a second to look around and appreciate the nature that stirs outside my window.

Huge oaks are silhouetted against our country lane, grey squirrels harvest the beech tree’s windfall, roe deer and muntjac flit nervously across the field, hyper-vigilance in every sinew. And the sun creeps up somewhere behind the white winter cloud to light our valley in a still December whiteness that is wrapped in Christmas promise.

There I go again.

I can’t help writing down everything that I see and feel. I feel a constant and overwhelming urge to write. I want to spend my whole day inside this last slow breath.

But I will burst this bubble very soon as my smartphone is pulsing malevolently on my desk. It demands that I dive into the sea of notifications. It will usher in the analytical function of my brain and slam the door shut on my dreams. For now, at least.

We are told to take risks, to be true to ourselves, to tune the dial in to the heart brain. If we live by the heart, then we are the truest versions of ourselves. Doing and being what we were born to. I love this strand of thinking.

But it doesn’t pay the bills.

This goes to the heart of what I, and I suppose many of us, are wrestling with on a daily basis. How to balance the yin and yang of our souls without disappearing up our own spiritual backsides and getting fired after turning up for work wearing a sarong and quoting French poetry.

I like the idea that if you work in a job that you love, then you will never work another day in your life. And who wouldn’t? But having not known about this phenomenon in my younger life, I fell into a career that certainly has its moments, but I do not know if I could say that I loved. Having turned fifty this year, I am experiencing a new level of self-reflection. It is a bit like a tidal wave of internal questions and self-assessment, not always invited and sometimes alarming in its intensity.

But mainly it is the common question that arrives in mid-life: “Am I happy with my lot?”

This leads to a mental appraisal of what I have done in the first half of my life and what I want to do in the second. Sounds simple enough, and it is probably even quite a good piece of spiritual housekeeping, but it does have to pass through the filter of my fifty-year-old brain with all of its tics and idiosyncrasies, which can lead to trouble.

The trouble starts when I think about those parts of myself that I have not tended down the years. Big parts of what was my emergent personality that have had the occasional flash of daylight, but mostly remained in the attic room gathering dust.

Art, writing, human nature and an incessant quest to find the humour in everything and anything. A complete inability to take anything seriously. And when I think about how these aspects that seemed to shape me as a young man have been stashed away under a dust sheet of pragmatism, I wonder about what could have been, had I really leaned into them and let them lead my career.

Would it be OK to pull back the sheet for a while and take a little look?

OK. I did it.

. . .

I am writing every day, I start each day by populating my journal, then I write at night, and I even use a portion of my workday to blog. It has been enlightening. I have done some drawing, and I had forgotten what a beautiful way art was to dissociate. A portal into simultaneous creation and meditation. These have been enriching not just in the act of them, but in opening the door to another side of myself.

It is like suddenly turning to an old friend who has been sitting next to me on a park bench for the last thirty years and picking up our conversation where we left off. Suddenly, my world is richer and wider.

But now I also have a pitched battle going on with my yin and yang.

I had always wanted to be a writer. I don’t mean someone who writes, I mean someone who is paid to write for a living. But I missed the early cues and lacked the intentionality as a young man to act upon this desire. The boy who could not take anything seriously. But now I am writing and remembering just how much I love it: the process, the creative outlet, letting all of those abstract thoughts and asides pour out of my brain onto a piece of paper or through a keyboard. It is like a new life and with some occasional validation, it is a life that now breathes on its own and grows inside me.

And I don’t want to stop, even now when it is 9:09 a.m. on a Monday morning, I have 22 WeChat messages from China, LinkedIn is blinking at me, I have not even opened my emails yet and I know that my to-do list will be a struggle even if I had started one hour ago. But the itch to keep writing is too strong to ignore, it must be scratched, and it is in the scratching that I allow myself to dream.

But it is still not paying the bills.

I have made a few hundred dollars on Medium, which I am hugely grateful for, but this has served only to feed my hunger for more validation and to trigger a nagging question, one that whispers day and night, like the Whatifs in Shel Silverstein’s enigmatic 1981 poem.

What if I am not really that good at this?

The challenge for me is to not let a midlife reawakening turn into a midlife crisis. No one is going to thank me, especially myself, if I close-up the business and pack myself off on a Moroccan writing retreat, sarong and French poetry in-tow.

Preserving space in my life for the things that are essential parts of me, whilst respecting the forces of pragmatism and the responsibilities that they protect would seem to be a more balanced road to follow.

So maybe my yin that sees what is just a beautiful view, can live alongside my yang that sees what is just a view.

But I’m still backing yin.

Note to self: write follow-up article after my one hundredth birthday.