Men at Work.

  2/17/09: G-d Jar Projects:

  - My band

  - my mural

  - the play or musical I will be in

  - the songs I write

  - the essays and poems

  - the bass I play

  - the vacation I take to Hawaii

  - the sketches I make

  - the painting I do

  - the creative job I am making

At the time I wrote this list, none of these were true or in my life. Today, of this task list I wanted “God” to complete, all except two have come to fruition.

It would be a year from putting this list in my “g-d box” when I would apply to graduate school for creative writing in poetry. It would be two years from then when I would take my first oil painting class at that college and start writing my daily blog.

It would be 4 years from putting this list in the jar when my friend would become a flight attendant, and ask me if I wanted to escape winter and my chemo treatments and go to Hawaii for cheap.

A few months from there, a year ago, I would finally accept the invitation to be a part of the band my friend had been asking me to join for years, and actually use the bass I’d bought for $5 when I was 19. And not long from then, I would begin auditioning and taking acting classes, and eventually be cast in a play.

The only items on this list that haven’t come to fruition yet are the mural and the creative job.

The mural seems less important than it did 5 years ago, though it would still be very cool to do.

The creative job “I am making” (whatever that means!) is still in flux, in process.

Astonishing, isn’t it, that things I had no idea how they would come to pass have all come to pass? I could never have imagined when I wrote that list that I would actually be in a band, or be able to go to Hawaii. Those were the gifts and “rewards” of successful, other people. But, some part of me has always believed that I can be one, or they wouldn’t have been in the box.

I love looking at this list. It is so concrete. I can check each off with a stroke of joy and elation: I painted! I wrote! I acted! I vacationed! WHOOP! Look at me, enjoying a life (in spite of my self).

We all know what I’m going to say: If everything else on the list has come to pass except the last one, then there must be hope that even that can come to pass as well.

I am not sure I’m exactly an optimist, but I am a believer in the efficacy of asking for help, not doing it alone, but doing it. Eventually.

Because, I should mention that going to school has saddled me with nearly $90,000 in student loan debt and sent me into a recovery program around my relationship to money and scarcity. I should mention that my airline friend offered me the trip to Hawaii because I needed a break from cancer. And that I only finally reached back out to my friend with the band as I was sitting alone and bald in my apartment, listening to a CD, and busted out crying because I wanted to be a part of something like that – because I didn’t want to be taken from the chance to have that in my life.

It’s not as if this list got checked off according to the “easy way,” is my point. It took a lot of work, help, reaching out, despair, action, pleading, and god damned willing it to be.

I would not have chosen this route to getting these items checked off, and yet, here I sit elated that so many of them have been. They say that it’s the journey not the destination, but these journeys sucked. The routes to getting here, to crossing off these accomplishments that have brought me joy, were really horrible, scary, and painful.

It’s a strange dichotomy to sit with: The immense gratitude for being where I am, and the questioning of the benevolence and efficacy of the path that brought me here.

So I guess what I sit with now is whether I want the road to crossing off the last item on this list – “my creative job” – to be as arduous as the roads before it. It is true that sometimes we don’t have a choice, and choices are made for us, but I feel today that I do have a choice on whether I want to struggle toward this final goal, whatever the circumstances, or if I want to acquiesce toward it. Maybe not even “acquiesce,” but move with joy. I mean I have a whole list of accomplishments to buoy this part of my journey, right? 

Maybe, just maybe, it doesn't have to be so hard.