"Death by Wallpaper & Flooring"

Leaping to the stage in a retro button-down black shirt and his signature specs; Rob Bell already had the crowd's attention. We had all come to find out just what "Drops Like Stars" really meant.

After cordial hellos, witty jokes about making lunches for his children and what it was like traveling to Iowa and Georgia; Bell finally opened up his talk with a contrast of suffering and joy. His opening story was of a man with two sons whose families each were pregnant in the same year, while one experienced miscarriage, and the other a beautiful birth. He noted that, like this family in the maternity ward, we all "live in the hallways," experiencing a life back and forth of both pain and profound celebration.

But instead of furthering the discussion as to why we suffer~ he continued with the idea that often, incredible creativity and beauty can be birthed in excruciating pain. He observed that the most inventive minds are often out of place in the most serious, monotone, or digressing circumstances.

Since hearing, there have been many ideas and points that stuck out to me. My mind stews over each of them carefully. And for now, I will touch on just one. After acknowledging an ironic scene in Old School, he said:

"He has the life that is often portrayed as the ideal, a wife, a house, a job, security, comfort, privilege, freedom- and yet it's left him bored, numb and in a low grade state of despair. His success has actually served to distract him from how deeply unsatisfied he is with his life. I assume none of us want to starve, or be shot at or lose someone we love, but it's possible to die a sort of death at the other end of the spectrum as well, isn't it?"

Bell touched on the fact that there is often part of us that craves a sense of controversy in our lives, a sense of need to adventure and to overcome, b/c as it happens, we too find that extraordinary things can come from difficulty. It's as if when the "art of disruption" occurs, we are building the pieces back in new ways, and having to look the future with new meaning and possibility~ because the "plan" did not turn out nor was it truly satisfying. Boredom is a frustration that leads to a longing for meaning and depth that often only suffering can bring.

There is a subconscious need to come alive in something, for something because we have found ourselves in a despairing rut of "death by wallpaper."

Bell noted a Japanese writer who said: "it's precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get a feeling, through this process, of really being alive."

So what is it, exactly, that our world has us trapped in, and how or where do we get detached from it?