[Subject line is from Jane Hirshfield's "French Horn."]

I spent a good part of yesterday night decluttering, especially after finding out that LP Pencil Box will take many of the supplies (and gift tags, etc.) that my mom had hoarded. They take magazines, too, so I went on a culling spree. One of the copies of UU World had an essay by Rev. Robert Hardies (All Souls DC) titled "Love the Contradictions":

On the center and left of the religious spectrum, the temptation to flee is also great. It usually occurs among those who have made a serious attempt to engage the complexity of modernity but have succumbed to its stresses and strains somewhere along the way. They burn out and withdraw, often to the confines of the nuclear family, declaring that the household represents the limit of their capacity to care. They may be aware of all the conflict that roils around them, but they have the luxury of retreat, often due to wealth and privilege. ...

We need a spirituality that moves us beyond fight and flight, one that sees complexity not as an enemy but as a friend. We need a spirituality that views paradox as a creative opportunity and contradiction as a stimulant.

...Let's not be fooled by the false dilemma of whether we should focus our lives on spiritual growth or social justice, as if the two are mutually exclusive. When we frame the conversation this way, we undermine both our spiritual health and our work for justice, and we misunderstand the meaning of a world-affirming spirituality.

There's a part of me that says "Amen" to this, but there's a part of me also stridently insisting (as in yesterday's post) that what appears to some people as retreat or flight or non-engagement is nothing less than making intelligent choices about how best to make use of one's gifts. To be fair to Hardies, I don't think he would disagree (and there's only so much complexity one can acknowledge in one sitting, particularly in print) -- but I also know that my guilt gorilla started to roar as soon as I saw the word "privilege" in relation to coping with burnout (as schemingreader observes, "No one who is privileged by a system wants to hear that they are"), and I've another friend actively struggling with this issue -- so I almost didn't quote this. It's on the verge of being too lofty for me. But at the same time, he's right about how

Learning to love contradiction is no small thing; it amounts to a fundamental spiritual imperative for our time. We live in a crazy-quilt world that is at once becoming smaller, more complex, and more polarized. This world presents us with contradictions at all levels -- within our own souls, in our communities, and in our world.

One of the things I have been grappling with over the past year is how my life will never not be complicated from here on out, and how I need to become enough at peace with that so that I'm not one of those soul-sapping people always in a state of crisis. Put another way, there's a fine line between pleasantly and psychotically productive, and I've crossed it far too often for my taste -- I cringe when someone indicates that they see me as a humorless self-dramatizing workaholic. I do realize this is not how the majority of my friends see me, so I'm not fishing for comfort here -- it's just that there's just enough truth in that to sting, and the fact that a good deal of it was genetically imprinted doesn't offer much consolation.

More to the point, one can't bloody sprint the entirety of a 3200-meter race. More sleep does mean fewer poems, and more socializing means fewer contracts, and those equations don't please me one bit, but at the same time, I'm not the type of writer who's going to produce poems and essays and courseware worth reading if that's all I do. And sometimes one pauses running not because one spies shiny golden apples by the wayside, but because there really is a boulder that's materialized in the middle of the path, and there's no running around it, so one has to haul out the spikes and the ropes and the claws and fumble-climb-slip over it ever so slowly and ever so inelegantly, but... well, to borrow calligrapher Peter Thornton's words, whining is for those who think it should be easy.