I can’t help wondering: will there ever come a day when we skip all the hemming and hawing and just get on with our important, daily work?
Will we ever, finally, manage to completely ignore all our excellent excuses:
The setting isn’t right.
I have less time than I thought.
I didn’t sleep well last night.
A very important other problem is raging through my head, unresolved.
Something aches–my head, my heel, my heart–and there’s no way I can do my best work today.
The pain of noticing how bad this paragraph seems, of how loud the “stop!” in my head seems, of how far away I feel from “the zone, is real.
That familiar mantra, “this isn’t working this time, why bother?!” is running on repeat at top volume. I could just put this off until tomorrow, couldn’t I?
On and on and on and on.
How many times until this all fades away?
I couldn’t tell you.
I’ve not gotten there yet.
But I suspect that the noise never disappears, nor is it my job to un-see it.
Instead, over time and with enough practice, while that noise remains, it becomes something that IS while I continue to DO.
The real secret is this: the IS and the DO exist on different planes. That’s why they don’t need to fight it out, because they can coexist if we just put our heads down and get on with it.
Nothing needs to be vanquished for us to do important work today.
Sasha, this is brilliant. thank you so much for writing it.