Obligation

A year since the last post. That’s getting married for you – an amazing, deep, whirlwind of a life change. And then the holidays and the busy start of 2013, Unscreened, etc. But, really, also wondering if this blog matters enough. When I think of taking it down, just acquiescing to “I am not a blogger,” I feel proud of some of my writings and the times they’ve been a useful reference for students or fellow travelers (hello, John Russo). But often, when I think of writing – an experiment that began at the advice of a publicist and social media consultant – it feels like BS. “If I’m not honestly driven to write, then I shouldn’t write.” And then I think about Obligation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about obligation this year. In many ways, the thread began during the High Holy Days last year, when our powerfully insightful Rabbi introduced Yom Kippur with a question about why we begin that evening’s service with a freeing of all obligations. At a time when we’re trying to focus on becoming better, on taking an honest moral inventory of our faults, why would we release ourselves of a sense of obligation, the one thing that seems necessary to force ourselves to change? Among numerous other profundities, Rabbi Finley spoke of how, if we look closely, we run our personalities on a kind of software coded with/of obligations. We obligate ourselves to things constantly, and many of those choices – and they are all choices – are irrational. In those, we enslave ourselves.

And then, being married – or, really, getting ready to be married – has either coincided with or, I suspect, generated a calm reexamination of all my feelings of obligation. Being married involves a strong conscious choice to obligate oneself in duty to another. I was also pulled to make that choice because this person and our relationship, of its own accord, took on a position of priority in my life. In comparison to my marriage, so many old obligations evaporate.

So then there’s “being an artist” – the thing I thought nobody in my life would ever supplant in priority – which is something baked into my psyche but which has also included obligation. When I was 9 and I knew, on my first day of rehearsal of my first professional production, that I was destined to become an actor and storyteller, I both received something and generated it. What I generated eventually hardened, as I grew up, into a kind of obligation to myself that’s expressed in the title of this blog. I will do it “come hell or high water.” And that’s been brilliant; it’s gotten me through a lot and further than I often thought I’d come. It’s made many specific dreams come true. But I’m also just not sure I want to operate quite that way anymore. I want to do things out of something deeper than an obligation to my own 9-year-old or adolescent self and his sense of what is good or right in the world. So I’m shifting a bit, and the blog is included in that.

But, for now, I’m going to proceed with it as a tool to help build the artist’s part of this new, expansive phase of my life. And to the other artists out there: keep on obligating yourself to our tribe; we need to stick together. Also, there is no tribe; don’t.