Fortunately Falling

Yesterday, I worked for the first time in a week. The slow economy still has construction in a choke-hold, and lately I'm lucky if I put in more than half time. I'm always amazed at how every activity, whether rooted in work or leisure, has its unique draw on energy. Stamina for work weakens over a period of unemployment, just like the tough skin on my hands. I found myself tired yesterday after three hours of work. My body wasn't really weary--I was tired in my mind because of the unfamiliarity of my own job.

The free time I've enjoyed on the days off has been welcome. I've read more, written more, and goofed off more. Initially, the extra time struck me as a rare opportunity to get things done: applications for graduate school, projects around the house, the correspondence course I started four years ago and never finished. Over time, however, the urgency of these tasks and the chance to finish them seemed less important. As I've grown accustomed to the late mornings with coffee and a video game, the easy lunches when my wife comes home and we munch on quesadillas, or the long afternoons of lolling on the sofa with a blanket and an aimless web-browser, I seem to have lost the drive to accomplish the things I was most excited to do when this sabbatical of a winter still loomed on the horizon.

Back in November, before the daily grind had slowed to a halt, I would spend the spare brain cells during my days thinking about what I would do with extra free time. Like tendrils on a burgeoning flower, my thoughts would branch and shoot and turn back on themselves as I pondered all the creative possibilities. Now I have that free time. And now I seem less interested and less motivated to spend it well.

On the way home from work yesterday, as I rode in the truck with heavy legs and a sore neck, I felt a familiar yet long absent feeling. It was that old desire to create. The same swelling, expanding desire to do something full of my own imagination, something that would make me and the world around me richer. All the many days that I had spent dinking around the house had failed to inspire me. Those had been the best time to act, yet had done the least to inspire me.

Theologians of old threw around the expression felix culpa, fortunate fall. They believed that the expulsion from paradise was a good thing. Some even went so far as to say that God knew mankind was too ungrateful to appreciate the goodness of life without a bit of bad mixed in. I'm enough of a Romantic that I suppose I'll always be dissatisfied with my circumstances. I'll always be thinking about the proverbial grass on the other side of the proverbial hill. But part of me wonders if something wired into all of us prevents us from appreciating all the good that surrounds us unless we're a bit uncomfortable. I'm pondering the words of another old theologian, a guy from Tarsus. He said he'd learned the secret of being content in every situation. Maybe he was content because he knew that every situation had some good and some bad. And maybe he thought that's the way it's supposed to be, at least for now.