The Desire for Desire 33 comments

By Sara Zarr

It's an understatement to say I'm behind in my reading. Approximately twenty-nine months after purchasing it, I've finally started to read Andy Crouch's Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.

And when I say “started,” I mean I finished the introduction. And then I stopped, because I've been hung up on this sentence ever since encountering it:

“What is most needed in our time are Christians who are deeply serious about cultivating and creating but who wear that seriousness lightly—who are not desperately trying to change the world but who also wake up every morning eager to create.”

There's a lot in the first part of that to ponder. But what has haunted me is the very last bit, about waking up every morning eager to create.

I quit my day job in January 2006 to write full-time. That's the fantasy most writers I know—aspiring and established—harbor: the day-job-quitting fantasy.

Here's how that fantasy goes, for many of us:

The number one motivator is time. Who has time for a job? Freeing up six to ten hours a day would no doubt result, posthaste, in a crop of those masterpieces that have been ripening within us from the sad, gray confines of our cubicles. No more staring into the office bathroom mirrors, watching ourselves age before our very eyes under the harsh gaze of fluorescent lighting and our abandoned dreams.

Also there is wardrobe. If you didn't have to stock your closet with business casual outfits, you'd have enough money for that MacBook Air, which of course would miraculously help you write your novel. And the day-job-quitting wardrobe offers comfort as well as economy: leggings, pajama jeans, velour tracksuits, ascots, capes...whatever tickles your fancy.

But in all seriousness, the true beating heart of the fantasy is the belief that without the obstacle of our jobs and all the stupid people we must encounter within them—those who refuse to see that we are not an administrative assistant, dammit, we are a creative genius waiting to be freed!—we will wake up every morning eager to create.

At this point I should perhaps start using “I” language.

In the years between when I started writing seriously and when I made enough to leave my non-lucrative, part-time, and benefits-free position of employment, the most powerful part of my fantasy was the imagined joy I would feel upon waking up in my life as a writer, the irresistible pull of my work, the exhilaration of creating life on the page.

Nearly five years since I started to live the dream, rarely, rarely do I wake up in the morning eager to create. More likely I wake up with a to-do list, the day already slipping through my fingers, a sense that failure is inevitable.

Some days, I experience an almost physical sensation of falling before I even get out of bed, and what I have to grab onto doesn't feel joyous—deadlines, the expectations of others, the knowledge that if I don't get up and dressed soon, despair will catch up with me.

What could be more profoundly the opposite of waking up in the morning eager to create?

I know this is at least partly biochemical. My genes are encoded with depression and anxiety, and it is currently the dead of winter, the Salt Lake valley blanketed with thick, freezing smog.

It's also spiritual. On the worst days, I feel and act like one those Israelites in the desert who somehow convinces herself that life as a slave was better than this life, whatever it is, that so often feels like aimless wandering.

My head is still likely to dwell in the self-centered fantasy of what a writing life could be, even as I'm living it. My thoughts are overcrowded with daydreams about having time, wardrobe, and MacBooks; the perfect desk set-up, the ideal writing schedule, the optimal smart phone.

I'm pretty sure God didn't bring me all this way just so that I could spend six hours researching wireless plans.

I want to discard this fantasy, once and for all (or, more likely, over and over again), and return to the heart of what I dreamed of from the beginning: the desire for desire. The obsession with self and with living the ultimate writing life does not leave very much room for joy; it's difficult to find, or scared to show up.

I'm making the Andy Crouch quote my prayer for 2011. Not just as it applies to my writing, but also to all the other creative works before me. As surely as art, music, dance, and writing are acts of creation, so are friendships, marriage, home, and community. They need my seriousness, but more than that they need my ardent joy and eagerness.

And I need my ardent joy and eagerness. Otherwise, writing is just another job full of the twin trapdoors of ego and despair, and today is just another opportunity to fail to accomplish my to-dos, and my husband is just another person who needs something from me and my friends are an impediment to my rigid daily schedule and my church community is just another fumbling organization in need of money.

I want to feel the irresistible pull of my work, the exhilaration of creating life on the page. Even more, I want to delight in participating in the creation of life off of the page. To be wake up eager for it. To clear out the clutter and make room for joy.