I've been thinking a lot about the hurricane survivors. I've been thinking about how hard it is to start a new life.

I know that my life cannot be in any compared to their lives -- lives of upheaval, suffering and renewal. Yet I cannot help but think about the themes that run through all our lives, the themes of courage and the will to start again.

Mostly what I have are questions. Questions such as:

1 - Why do some people stay?
2 - Why do some people go?
3 - What attitudes keep people/us/me stuck in places that will never be the same again?
4 - What attitudes allow people/us/me to move forward with lives after all has been lost?
5 - Why do some people insist on trying to recreate that which can never be again?
6 - What kind of loss is there in standing and fighting? What is gained?
7 - What kind of losses are there in moving into a life that is new?

I watched the Truman Show over the weekend and I think this movie has a lot to say about recreating one's life. At some point we each have our own limit that we must move on...but how do you do that? What is the cost? What is to be gained? Each of these questions must be answered individually, they cannot be answered en masse.

I read this quote today from "Fearless Creating" and it seems to fit these questions:

"Not many men are prepared to face the challenge of themselves, to assume the full responsibility for thier own existence. Rank concluded that there were three levels or styles of response to this self-challenge;

the first, and most common, was simply to evade it;
the second was to make the effort of self-encounter, only to fall back in confusion and defeat (the person arrested in his creative development this way Rank called the 'artist-manque');

the third, and much the least common, was that of carrying the confrontation through to self-acceptance and "new birth". These three attitudes or approaches correspond to Rank's three types o fhuman character: the "average" or adapted man, content to swim adjustively and irresponsibly with the tide; the "neutortic" type, discontented alike with civilization and hiimself; and the "creative", the twice-born (as represented in the ideal types of Artist and Hero) -- at peace with himself and at one with others."

What is really illuminating to me is that in most christian literature the idea of "twice-born" is not at all a new concept, and yet it rarely has been connected to that of creativity. Go into many churches and what you see is bland uniformism. Creativity creates anxiety it seems in most of these places. And yet creativity, that of imagining and sustaining a new life is the most creative of all endeavors, yes?