Most of the time, the phrase is, “it’s time to get back to work.”
This means it’s time to stop being creative, stop dancing with possibility, stop acquiring new insights and inspiration–and go back to the measurable grind instead.
Maybe we’d be better off saying, “I need to get back to making magic.” Because that’s what we’d actually like to be getting paid to create.
We are on day 187 of 15 days to slow the spread.
Saturday night, after spending the day working to clear out fifty-seven years of theatre magic, I had hoped to work on a project. It’s a mix of art and writing, and one that I had hoped to publish by the end of the month.
NARRATOR: It will not be published by the end of the month.
I ended up avoiding anything productive that evening, but I found myself thinking that I want to be creating more. Doing more magic if you will.
I want to be creating theatre. I want to be creating magical memories at the amusement park.
Both are on hold indefinitely.
Both will be back…eventually.
Packing away a theater is hard work. On the one hand, we’re looking at this as an opportunity. But it’s also a little sad when you look at set pieces and props and wonder if you’ll ever need them again and whether they’re worth trying to put in storage. There’s nothing really magical about that.
Some amusement parks are open. I have friends who just returned from Disney World. But my amusement park won’t open this year.
I’m missing both the magic and the income.
So, how do I look at my to do list and decide what is “getting back to work” and what is “making magic?”
There’s no magic in my day job or in the yard work that keeps evading me.
NARRATOR: It’s not the yard work that is doing the evading.
The challenge becomes finding the time to do the magic and not being so exhausted from the non-magical work.
I’m sure there are dozens, if not hundreds of self-help, business-type books, seminars and (shudder) webinars out there to “fix” this issue.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time for them.
The fact is, we’ll always have this struggle.
Supposedly, Confucius said:
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
Although, a simple Google search finds multiple sources for the quote, including “unknown.”
Very few of us ever get to that point. Part of the problem being that we’re making those decisions when we’re in our teens and twenties, but we often don’t figure it out until much, much later.
Your decades may vary but I for one couldn’t get the left turn signal to work in Albuquerque.
Today is the last official day of Summer 2020. While I hate to see summer go, I think we’re in agreement that the sooner we finish with 2020 the better.
Not, like I’ve said before, that a change of the calendar on December 31st is going to suddenly make the pandemic disappear.
That’s actually scheduled for November 3.
Too soon?
It’s Monday. While I’d like to make enough magic to make the work go way, that’s just not going to happen.
Let’s get to it.
Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash