being uninspired

Sometimes it helps to turn things upside down. How do you feel about being uninspired? Is it like you're waiting for something better to happen, for life to resume again? What if I told you it's the greatest state of all, this lack of inspiration? That's where you'll meet your true self! That's when your lesser selves are finally off their game enough for true emptiness to shine.

It's hard to see things this way. It's upside down. We're accustomed to thinking of inspiration as a time of valuable harvest in our lives, and of the periods between the harvest as a drag. Some of us mature enough to look at the in-betweens as a necessary part of the overall process, as gestation. But that outlook is only more covert worship of the mighty god Inspiration. It posits the periods away from inspiration as nothing more than the means to future inspiration. It gets away with calling those periods in-betweens!

They're so much more. They're the pith and essence. They're the shining crown on the big bloated head of inspiration, bowed at last. When the tingling rush of inspiration wanes and we settle into the doldrums and purposelessness that come afterwards, we are entering new territory in which we don't know who we are anymore. Our inspired confidence for expanding our sense of self has played out, begins to shrink, returns to its normal proportions, but won't stay put! It keeps shrinking. We collapse on the couch. We put on the TV. We can't sit still to save our lives, but we can't focus much either. Often for days. Sometimes for weeks.

This sorry state of affairs is when the journey into truth really gets going. It's when you have to deal with all your worst struggles against yourself, see all the worst things you spend lifetimes avoiding, surrender to feelings you don't want to feel. It's the purpose of inspiration that it ends, and that it drops you like a sack of rocks. The crash is the gold, the reward, the beginning. It's where you have to decide are you a hero, do you want to wear that word as a badge with a capital H, or can you drop your expiring ideas about yourself cold turkey now that it's time to be uninspired? That's when the true evolution is going to happen, spiritually speaking, right there at that moment of change, and in the period that follows.

Why? Because the letting go into lack of inspiration is a big letting go. It's generally bigger than any triumphant letting go that precedes it while you are inspired. While you are inspired, for all the risks you might take, you take them from a sense of daring and well-being. You take them in confidence. You take them with security, even if you take them into insecure places. Take is absolutely the word for it. Even when letting go is what's occurring, the inspired stretches in your life are all about taking. You take a risk. You take a chance. You take a bite out of life. You may be letting go of things to do it, but the taking is the emphasis. Take take take.

When the inspiration passes, you don't take anything. Rather, the things that you take are no longer romantic. You take a nap. You take medication. You take a beating. Taking felt so good while inspired that we try to force language to distill the feeling again by persisting in the words that go along with that state. It becomes funny, because the period after inspiration is not about taking. It's about releasing. It's about letting go. And it trumps the letting go of the inspired state because this kind of letting go happens not in the great light of wonder, but in the murky darkness of confusion. It's a terrible blow to the expanded sense of self to realize its time in the spotlight is over. So soon? Our inner life reels at the news.

But that reeling motion is what shakes out the truth. You don't have a leg to stand on anymore. You don't know who you are. You don't like not knowing. You want back that feeling of being bold and inspired, purposeful and pliant, but you can't have it. Your attempts to manufacture it artificially eventually fail also, and collapse into deeper darkness. If only, while you were in it, you could see this chain of events for what it is. If only you could see that now, after all the little warm ups (also known as the fruits of inspiration), you are finally getting what you really want, the great hammer blows of truth. Ask any inspired person, while inspired, what they are after at that time, what they most want to encounter, most demand from experience. They'll say the words: the truth! Then ask during the down times. They'll say the truth has gone away. But it can't. If it can come and go, it isn't the Truth. It's something else.

What they wanted wasn't the truth, not the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God. What they wanted was a comfortable portion of the truth, a portion of truth they could assimilate on their own terms, not on the terms dictated by the truth itself. But the truth eventually states those terms and you can't avoid them. That's the greater opportunity at the heart of feeling uninspired. You're stuck with your worst self on truth's terms. You're face to face with the hardest parts of yourself. Learn to recognize them.

That encounter is so valuable because you want what can come from it. Anyone who enjoyed inspiration in the first place, anyone who squirms when inspiration recedes, is not really looking for the standard fruits of inspiration in the first place. It's not the physical products of our work that we're looking for. That point of view is a common myopia, but not correct for all its ubiquity. What we're looking for is not the products at all, but the thing they're supposed to make happen: we're looking to be happy. And the best way to do it is to start taking stock of the things you least want to know about yourself. If you really mean it. If you really want to be happy. If so, accept that version of yourself in its entirety that you think of as uninspired. The one who is waiting for something better to happen. All that one's flaws.

That's where the real you is waiting also. The real you is everything. It already knows that nothing better can happen, because better is a game. It already knows that inspiration is a game too and leads to happiness by accident only, never directly, but rather by playing itself out repeatedly until its own silliness and futility come forward. I'm not saying you should sit around being uninspired all the time. But if you inhabit those stretches as if they are wisdom, curious to know yourself in the midst of them, you'll discover and expand who you are much more deeply than you did in the inspired stretches. You'll find out you're both, and you're much more besides.

Give it a try. The next time you're not as inspired as you wish you were, realize that wishing you were more inspired crushes the wisdom of not being that way. Wouldn't you rather get to know your deepest self instead? Then take the state you've got. Take it. Do you hear me? I'm calling it something to take. Take it!