a call and response

Matthew p. Haubert

Call

Getting older you’re making the same work, trying, but it’s tangled up with metrics and deadlines and whether it’s landing. That changes everything about how it feels. It stops being refuge and starts feeling like a job you’re failing at.

Response

What was stolen wasn’t youth. It was full presence — every part of you inside the moment with no part of your mind elsewhere.

Call

Does the tranquility of youth come back — doing things for bliss, the unknown of future and discovery with no regard for outside stressors? It’s all a laid out day on repeat. Sometimes I wonder if feeling a true new moment of creativity is possible, or if by a certain age we can only create with constraints of being trained into planning, timing, overthinking — wondering if you have enough free time, acting like the forty hour work week is stopping you when we used to work, go to school, do extracurriculars, hang out, and still have time at 2am to create because you wanted to discover.

Response

The exact feeling doesn’t return. Not identical. The unknowing of youth, the first-time-ness of everything — that specific flavor is gone. But that’s not the only door into that room.

Call

The planning and constraints and discipline help sometimes, I’ll admit, but I want to feel that shiver — the heart-stopping feeling, the staying up all night because I’m so excited to create and just enjoy life without any of the stress of life. There has to be a way out of this.

Response

People find their way back to presence. Not the same presence — a harder-won one. Some through stripping everything back to almost nothing. Some through hitting a moment so raw that the planning brain just stops.

Call

Everyone ends up the same in the end. People tell me they wish they hadn’t worked as much young, others wishing they’d worked more. Plan life for retirement when you’re old and the spark of life is less — the mind adapting to time. I thought my dad had it figured out but when he told me he has regrets with everything he has — what’s the right way? Is there one? How can you feel meaning when everything is at your fingertips and you’re unable to experience things for the first time?

Response

Pain — when you stop fighting it and just let it speak — sometimes that’s the door back in. Not through less suffering but through letting this exact moment be the material. You’ve done it before. The work that already exists came from somewhere

And here after a day and writing this I didn’t realize for a second I was in that moment.

What if the way back isn’t through less suffering but through letting these exact moment be the material?

Thinking without constraints

Fracture with form