Acting Without the Drama

Reconnecting

September 24, 2008. I can sleep anywhere.

Seriously.

I have been known to sleep on sharp rocks, standing up, in the middle of a conversation and driving.

I’m not sure that this would be considered a talent.

Unfortunately, this occasionally transfers over to my mental and emotional life as well. I can go unconscious and emotionally and mentally check out in a heartbeat. When I’m driving and starting to feel drowsy, there are signs that will warn me I should pull over. Same with the checking out thing.

Being actively creative is pretty much an impossibility while we’re unconscious, just in case anyone was wondering. Creativity is the process of connecting the subconscious and conscious mind, not the subconscious and unconscious one.

After all of the hullabaloo of the last few weeks, I pretty much checked out in terms of forward creative movement. Not as badly as I have before, and certainly I didn’t stay there as long. But still…pretty unconscious.

Luckily, I have a partner. She was checked out, too. That got to be really uncomfortable. We weren’t connecting as well as we had been. We weren’t staying accountable to each other. We weren’t checking in.

Ah, it’s that whole checking in thing again. In acting, as in life, if we’re not checking in, we won’t ever be truly present in a moment. And isn’t that really what being conscious is? Being aware of what’s happening right now?

Again, gotta go back to the partner. We’ve established a wonderful working relationship, where if things are uncomfortable, we talk about it. Which we did. It started out a bit awkwardly, with some missteps here and there, but we reconnected in a meaningful way, making plans to move forward, checking in along the way.

And just like that, I felt awake again.

There will always be moments where we start to drift into a mental and emotional coma. It’s what we choose to do in those moments that I believe truly defines the kind of people we are. Are we going to point fingers and assign blame, or are we going to take responsibility for our actions and wake up?

I choose the waking up option.

Reconnection rocks.