I can’t sleep, because I haven’t given life to something, breath to something as simple as a line on a page, a notion in print, and I’ve gone to bed too many nights knowing that there has been a promise broken, somewhere, to myself. It is a blessing to fall in love with something: a craft, or a medium, an instrument or a means. But that blessing comes of course, with the yearning to exercise and expend the impulse.
The yearning is healthy, life giving, if you let it breathe and take you down the path, or the passage where the notion wants to lead. Music is a wonderful medium, to balance the tension, the wait and the fulfilment of an idea, a line, a response to a call. But writing, God help me, holds little of the same wonderment.
When you can see a story through, from beginning to end, then that delicate dance has its place. But when you’re simply giving frame and form to truth, then the tension can become a burden, because it isn’t waiting for the call and the response, it’s waiting for the moment when you can set the world aside to see it as it truly is.
It’s waiting for the moment when your house is all at rest, so you can chronicle the intoxicating love you have for your wife, your children, the pattern and pace of life and all that God has granted you. You’re almost waiting to set life aside to honour it. There is the toil and labour of the day - the honest and honourable work that will feed your family and keep the lights on. Then there is the silent, sublime task of shaping word, and phrase, and memory and song.
There is the delicate task of the player, the poet, the painter, the performer, who begins a line before he knows how to end it. It is an act of faith, to set aside the utility, the convenience, the common sense of sleep and rest and good, clear thinking, to wrestle with the mystery of what may become of a given work, a concept, a musing, or an improvisation.
And as I get older, I become more and more convinced, that to let the impulse rot within you, to ignore it again and again, is a betrayal of the good God who granted you the yearning in the first place. We have been blessed with intellectual and creative capacities that reach far beyond the utility of survival and propagation of a species. The joy of poetic meter has no place in a world in which function trumps fervour. Truth, beauty and goodness are inextricably linked, and must be savoured, championed and born anew again and again.
You cannot let the impulse rot within you. You must hold the instrument in your hands and give it life, to honour the gift you’ve been given. You must be reckless, sleepless, prolific and bold. As I write this, one of my eight sons shuffled in, having woken through the night as he often does. I get to tuck him in again. I get to embrace him, and tell him that I love him, and trust that sleep will descend upon him again.
He was born with his twin brother at 27 weeks, and they both could have died the day they’d taken their first breath. But they didn’t, and what followed were years and months of heartache, and strain, and tumult and toil - protecting and nurturing the both of them to see them now, flourishing, as intelligent, capable and creative boys that we’re incredibly proud of. We could have had sleep, We could have had peace. But God called us to more. Always.
Just as He does you. There will be time to sleep, or time to do something practical, or reasonable. Maybe now is not the time.