It has been a monochrome day. The bright blue sky and the brilliant sunset of yesterday have been replaced by snow, a strange kind of snow that has fallen heavy all day, and left barely a trace on the ground.

The day started brightly however. I had breakfast in a little diner a couple of blocks off of the shore of Provincetown. It is the only place in town open for breakfast in the winter and still there was only one other person here besides the waitresses. It’s a relentlessly cheerful place, with bright yellow walls and red leatherette seats on the booths. There are peace signs in every window.

It is odd, being in a place and a time with no schedule, and with nothing I have to do for anyone else. For the next few days, I have no clients. I have no son to ferry too and fro. I have no sermon to prepare. No housework. No promises to keep.

And no plans.

I hope to do some writing. I hope to spend some more time walking the beaches. I hope to do a lot of things. But I have no plans.

Don’t get me wrong. Plans are good. Plans get us from Point A to Point B. Or at least get us started. Too often though, I think we get so tied to plans and to do lists that we crowd out our souls. At least I do.

Last night, after dinner and a walk through a deserted town, I came back to my room and read a while. I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Big Magic”. I read it slowly, as I do all such books, because it makes me think.

Last night’s chapter was on permission. She contends that we generally feel like we are asking permission to live the lives we want. And if life – that mix of jobs and friends and family and societal expectations give us negative feedback, then we adjust our sails and go with the wind.

My life has a been cycles of going with the wind of the world around me at times, and tacking against the wind at other times. Of being the responsible one, and being the adventurous one. Back and forth, Back and forth. It’s not been an either or thing for me however.

The thing is, I like aspects of both.

I like being the responsible one. I like being the one who can get things done. For all it’s headaches (and there are lots of them), I have enjoyed my stints as a manager and leader of companies and organizations.

I also hate being the responsible one. I love wandering from idea to idea. I love pondering things. I slowly wear out when life is busy and productive, when I am with and helping others constantly. I recharge in the empty times.

Obviously there is a tension between those two. And I have often felt that life was a ping pong game between the two.

Maybe that is how it is supposed to be. But somehow, I don’t think so. I think we’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that somehow creativity and spirituality are somehow diametrically opposed to responsibility. You can be one, or the other. Pick a team.

In recent years, I’ve come to see it differently. The two can be different and separate, but I don’t think they were meant to be. It has taken me a long time to come to this place, and I am likely slow to the party. But the place I have come to is a healthier place, I believe.

Today, I see responsibility and creativity not as opponents, but as parts of a whole. We CAN be one or the other, or much more one than the other, but we are healthiest when we have a good balance between the two.

And it is a balance. Like standing on the fulcrum point of a see-saw, we are always shifting to keep the balance just so. At times we will lean this way or that; life will pull us one way or the other. Sometimes a little. Sometimes a lot.

It is easier to just let gravity win and walk down the see-saw in one direction of the other. But, when we dance to keep the balance…. Well there is an energy in that, a satisfaction in letting one side feed the other, even if it is more work.

Oddly, when I manage the balance well (and I often don’t.), both sides of my life succeed far more than when life is lopsided. If I keep my creativity side vibrant, my responsible work/life side thrives best. When I have a healthy dose of discipline and responsibility going on, it keeps me creating day in and day out.

Of course it will get out of whack. My life has been out of whack the past few months. That’s why, I believe, I’ve felt a malaise recently. That’s why I am sitting in P-town at the edge of the cape doing…. Well I don’t know what I will be doing. That is the whole point.

We have to monitor our lives. That’s been one of my biggest lessons in life. Too often we fall into habits. We run on autopilot. We forget to be conscious. And if we don’t keep ourselves on track, someone else – work, family, friends, church, clubs….. Something besides ourselves will suck us into their world until we can’t see our way out. Slowly, the best us is starved out of us.

It can happen so slowly we don’t even notice it, unless, UNLESS we are aware of what feeds us, and unless we are constantly checking in to make sure we are in a healthy balance. And there is danger in that. It’s easy to correct our course when we’re just a bit out of whack. It’s hard, really, really, really hard when we let it go too far.

The good news is that it’s really, really, really hard, but it’s doable. I know. I’ve lived it. Heck, I was the poster child for “out of whack” for a long time. And I paid a dear price for it.

I sat in the bright diner at the edge of town for an hour or more, listening to Louis Armstrong singing duets, sipping coffee and watching the snow fall, and without a plan of what to do next thinking about what has been bothering me the last month or two. Balance. That might be it Not because my life is terribly out of balance, but because it is a bit out of balance, and I have seen the damage a life that continues on that out of balance journey does. In my case, the damage was bad enough that it took years of struggle to get myself right again. I had to focus on my life, on being aware, on spirituality, on creativity, on relearning my emotional vocabulary. I don’t want to ever go through that recovering process again. Ever.

I ended up writing most of the day Sitting at a table, watching the snow, a strange kind of snow that fell hard all day long, and writing. Through the day people wandered in and out of the little coffee shop I settled in and from time to time I would stop and talk with them. But mostly, I wrote. I wrote in my journal. And I wrote chapters in a novel I have flirted with for years, but only this year settled down to write.

In those years of not writing it, I found myself frustrated. I write naturally. If I sit down to do it, give myself a few minutes to settle in, it just happens. I’ve often said that I hardly work at writing. What I work at is getting out of the word’s way. Clearing my mind enough to let whatever is in there flow. That (now) comes easily with poetry. But it has not with the novel, until this year.

What changed? I finally admitted that I don’t write fiction worth a damn, and the original concept was all fiction. What changed was when I realized that in a way, the hero’s story is mine. That while the character and his circumstances were different, what caused his pain, what sent him on his journey of discovery was not that far from my own life. It should have been obvious, but it wasn’t. At least not to me.

Once I understood my own story, writing Abraham’s (Abraham is the main character) story has become easy. All but the ending.

You see, my ending hasn’t happened yet. I am still on the journey. We can do that in life. In fact, that’s the best way to live life, I think, as if it had no ending. But books must end. They need denouement. They need closure. And my story is full of loose ends. So as I walked to the coffee shop, I gave myself permission. Permission to dream. Permission to give Abraham the ending I would like to have. To go from making my story his, to making his story mine.

And it just flowed. Three chapters. If my fingers weren’t so sore, I’d probably do the last two or three chapters tonight, but I will do them tomorrow and Sunday before I head back to Vermont. I’ll be done. And I can begin something new.

I finished the third chapter about four. I talked to the woman I love on the phone till five, then went for a walk on the beach. It was still grey. The clouds were not unrelenting and the snow had stopped, leaving a bit of color on the sand. I walked till dark, then had dinner, ending with coffee that sits off to the side.

Do I know what has been wrong with me these past few months? Not yet. Not entirely. And I may or may not find out on this trip. It might be a life out of balance. It might be that I was just tired of being a grown up and needed to have more make believe in my life, in the form of writing. It might be something else. But today has been a good day. I gave myself permission for it to be a good day, not caring what anyone else thought or how they thought I should spend my little vacation. I got to just be where my whims took me.

And it felt good.

Be well. Travel wisely.

Tom