Free Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life by Osb Joan Chittister, Joan Sister Chittister Page B

new questions. New data, demanded by the new questions, turn the worldupside down—like the Kinsey Report, the atomic bomb, feminism, desegregation, transgenderism. And creativity—an attempt to put things back together again but in whole new ways—touches every dimension of the human condition. Art thrives, human relationships change, classism dies, national boundaries begin to seep.
    We look at our lives now and as the poet says, “We see it again for the first time.”
    Confusion becomes the dream state of the awakened mind. The fragments of life, scattered now in broken and bizarre ways, can be restructured in freakish new ways, the results of creativity in every field. Like Picasso’s mother superior, government minister, washing machine and Eiffel Tower, the shakeups of our lives settle into a fresh and dynamic way of seeing the world.
    So the marriage of confusion and creativity is the beginning of new life. We start now from places we have never been allowed to imagine before and out of them we can imagine new conclusions, as well.
    It is the dream state of the soul reaching for new heights, new understanding, new insights into what it might mean to be alive in different and more productive and more provocative ways—which in their turn will also grow old and worn and overdone and so, eventually, prompt their own demise and their own resurgence.
    It is the symphony of resurrection played over and over in us, every day of our lives. As Daisaku Ikeda puts it, “You must not for one instant give up the effort to build new lives for yourselves. Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life.”

16
T HE S ANITY OF I RRATIONALITY
    All parents drum ideas into their children’s heads and all children remember them forever, however hard they tried to ignore them as they heard them. As in, “Too much speed, too little progress” or “Don’t eat that, I just bought it!” My own mother’s favorite was “Joan, think!” It was a mantra in my house. When I put a blouse on a hanger backward, it was “Joan, think!” If I spelled an “ei” word “ie,” it was “Joan, think!” Years later, if I turned north instead of south in the car, it was “Joan, think!” If it was a life question that demanded some kind of wisdom for an answer, it was “Honey, just think a little harder; the answer will come to you.”
    So pervasive was the idea that thinking was the answer to everything in life that years later, when I was trying to configure a screen saver for my computer, I found myself using three-inch-high letters to inscribe across my desktop, “Joan … think!”
    The great god of rationality ruled life—in school, at home, in religion, in those terrible word problems in arithmetic, in relationships and certainly in the kind of decision making across the years that would surely change life. Living the right life depended on getting the right answer to everything: where to go, what to do, whom to go through life with, when to make a move, why to bother.
    Except that it didn’t. All the thinking in the world did not save me from buying the wrong kind of gifts, or going to the party with the wrong people, or accepting the wrong invitation or taking the wrong course or ordering the wrong thing off the menu. Surely there was something else to life besides reason.
    I had friends who did all those things and seemed to truly enjoy talking about their mistakes. I watched other people laugh about the bends in the road of life that had led them to one dead end after another. I found out that one bad decision is often more enlightening than what the “right” one would have been. I found out that dating the wrong person does not signal the collapse of a person’s social life. Clearly there is something other than rationality that is required if life is ever to have the spice and flavor, the nudge and nonsense that real living brings with it.
    The interesting thing is that I found the missing link