Invention

Welcome, everyone joining us. This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. (That’s a concept we’ll expand on in today’s edition.) You can read through the series starting here. Some of my own favorite posts are Improvising, Woo woo, and Home.

This newsletter—I don’t like the word, which reminds me of the mimeographs that the PTA would send home in my lunchbox in 1991—is three months old today. I started writing it because I wasn’t sure what else to do.

I’d just found out abruptly that a job for which I’d been recruited over many months was not going to materialize—a role that would have been a return to the news industry where I’d built a lucky and enthralling career. I would work with words. I would lead a team. I’d know what I was doing. And I’d be safe.

The room where I build my creative body. (There’s a Peloton outside the shot.)

So it was an “oh, shit” moment when this fell through. For a couple of weeks, I had conversations with everyone I could think of about a wide assortment of job prospects—almost anything, really, to get the direct deposit flowing in again, to stop writing vast monthly checks for COBRA health insurance, to resume my place in a familiar architecture of life.

But I knew something important already, and in those weeks—in my pandemic-hardened routine of writing and meditation and physical training—I began to hear it coming through, louder than it had ever before. It said that what I had been doing was not a break from real life, with an expiration date. This was real life—cultivating physical strength and mobility and presence in my body so that I could follow a creative calling with lightness and confidence; and listening to that creativity so I could, as the Mormons say, “run and not be weary”—and I already had some of the tools to share it. So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Another word I don’t love is ”reinvention.” It just feels fishy, the idea that one thing goes away and is replaced neatly by something else, like the models on the Calvin Klein billboard in SoHo. On what authority could you ever say your reinvention was complete? There is no before and after. We’re all just becoming. Sometimes it happens forward and sometimes backward; sometimes we revert to a more comfortable past, or leap crossways into the almost total darkness of a future that we’ve consented to let surprise us. There’s no “re-” needed, in my opinion, because we’re inventing all the time. The more alive we are, the truer this is.

Nevertheless, the me who sends out his little newsletter twice a week and goes to yoga teacher training and researches the least tax-disadvantaged way to gnaw on a corner of his 401k—while other as-yet-undetected inventions approach the scene—is not the me who, back in June, thought he was just going to need a better office chair for all the middle-management Zooming. In large part that is a result of the invention of this newsletter. Turns out it wasn’t just something to do; it became the container in which to articulate a theory.

Here’s the theory, and not everyone is gonna like it: We’re embodied beings. This is the most surprising and sacred thing about us. When we think that our physical experience is separate from our psychic one, we’re cradling an illusion. All action, all thought, all experience, all purpose, all relationship, and all creation are the work of the body. And while some broader consciousness out there might be more durable, we ourselves don’t get forever. Thus it is our obligation, our gift, to invent our way through the unfavorable conditions which, until the day we die, will manage to surround us. If we don’t make it the purpose of our lives to create—on the page, on the piano bench, across the pillow from our lover, in the quiet counsel we give to our colleagues, in the swimming pool, upon the mountain—it doesn’t mean we’re bad or that we failed: “You don’t ever have to do anything sensational for people to love you,” Mr. Rogers said. (Write that somewhere in permanent ink.) But it does mean that our experience wasn’t as large or as full or as true as it could have been. I wish to avoid this fate, and I wish for you to avoid it, and that is why we are here.

Coming Friday: Stillness.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.