The Slow Boat To Redemption

If there is a thicker person on this planet, I challenge them to a slow witted contest. I am like the proverbial Englishman who takes 30 years to get the punchline to a joke - only, in this case, I take 30 years to get the punchline to the truth. Quick to respond, slow to understand - that's me. And I'm not all that quick to respond, but I'm REALLY slow to understand. Any day now, I expect to fully comprehend something that I allegedly learned in Kindergarten, so if you see me yelling Eureka, you'll know why.

My revelations this week come more recently from the past six months and more deeply from events 15 years ago. We'll start with the mea culpas from less than six months ago, while they're still fresh in my mind.

So as not to be unduly influenced by more creative minds around me, I have perfected a filter around my creative brain which weeds out pretty much all stimulae into the creative centers of my tiny mind. This is helpful when I see movies like Back to the Future and decide that what my spine tingling thriller about renegade priests needs most is a time traveling Delorean. With the filter in place, egregious mistakes in tone and plot are eradicated before they are foist upon my readers. With the filters taken out, I am no better than most television executives siezing upon whatever the latest piece of gossip is in order to create a temporary hit TV show.

Where this filter is not helpful, however, is when I ask for help by having people read my stories and give me feedback. In the old days, if anyone criticized my work, I jumped all over them and told them why they were idiots. This had a negative impact on my ability to recruit people to read my stories. I have since learned to keep those spring loaded responses locked safely in my head. However, I will still dispute their criticism even as I'm hearing it (I completely disagree. It's imperative for the Priest to have this time traveling Delorean... don't you see?). I've dropped the idiot from my defense, but the tone is there. I still feel really bad about it. I'm my own worst enemy. Please, please help me read my book... IDIOT! No, wait... that's not what I meant at all...

The point of all this is that, eventually, I come around to their point of view and that makes me feel even worse. Of course, they were right all along. And of course, I still feel like calling them idiots. But the reality is that I'm the only idiot in this conversation. I'm the one who can't see the obvious.

So, the tweaking I'm doing again on the Novel is as a direct result of all the small critiques I received from various idiots... I mean, people... over the last six months. You were right. I was wrong. And if I'd spent more time fixing the problems and less time defending them, I'd have been done a lot sooner.

Having said that, I want to show that this is a constant pattern in my life. I had a stunning insight the other day. I imagined some of the things I said to my ex-girlfriend fifteen years ago, from her perspective at the time, and I came across looking like a completely insane child. Wow. That would crush my ego if I weren't fifteen years removed from said events. But, see, for fourteen years I struggled with the question of why we broke up and its only now that I'm beginning to understand that one of us wasn't really ready for a relationship at the time... and it wasn't her.

I think wisdom is God's way of letting our psyches and egos down gently. We are, after all, ridiculous creatures with grandiose pretentions about our place in the world. If we were to suddenly be able to see where we actually stood in the scheme of things, our brains would probably melt. But with gradual, dawning wisdom, we can recognize ourselves from a distance, see ourselves in a new light and with a new understanding of our own insignificance, and turn our attention to more important matters.

I am a fool for not listening to the great advice I've been getting about my novel, but I'm remedying that now. I only ask that those who have criticized my work keep doing so. I need to be reshaped and remolded as much as, if not more, than my novel. And the only way that will happen is if someone shines the light of truth on my pathetic and glorious reality.

I'm on the slow boat to redemption, but I am still floating.