Before I Eat

“Its [Resistance] aim is to shove us away, distract us from doing our work.”

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“Life's short.  Spend most of it minding your business”

Constance Chuks Friday

Before I eat, before I rest, before I make a bowl of popcorn and get some comic books, I need to write.  I feel like I’ve hit a slump, which is silly considering how many blogs I’ve written and how much fun I’ve had writing them in the last week alone.  But for whatever reason, I feel like I hit some sort of slump, that I’ve run out of things to say.  Of course, all of that is just one more trick of the Enemy.  The Enemy uses many weapons – fear, confusion, apathy, distraction, and more.  The answer is always the same:  take action.  Do something.  Do your work. 

In my case, my work is to write.  Honestly, I’d rather do this than just about anything else.  Last night I got some extra time, but I wasted some of it playing online games.  I could hear Steven Pressfield’s voice in my head, telling me real writers write and they don’t allow distractions.  That wasn’t really his voice though.  It was the Enemy’s voice making me feel like garbage, worse, like an amateur.  Guilt is just another weapon the Enemy uses.  It backfired though.  Rather than giving into it and telling myself I’m no good and I lack commitment, I wrote two blogs instead of one.

Now I’m wondering if this “slump” was just another way for the Enemy to distract me. 

Distractions are good if you don’t want to do your work.  I just realized another distraction that came along, and it wasn’t until I talked to my Muse about it that I felt relief.  I won’t go into specifics, but I had an unpleasant and embarrassing encounter with someone who was power-obsessed.   I experienced my own obsession about the situation for much of the last 30 hours.  Now I see it for what it really was – a tactic to keep me from focusing on my writing. 

This is what I’m supposed to be doing – sitting in my chair with my Muse and writing.  This is all I’m supposed to be doing. I’m not supposed to be worrying about people on power trips.  Let others have their small ponds.  I’d rather have the ocean.  That’s where my house on the beach is.

That’s all I need to focus on.

I’m not supposed to be involved in any drama.  None at all. 

None.  At.  All.

I’m supposed to be sitting here with my Muse, in our chair, and writing.  Nothing else. 

And that was the lesson I almost missed.  I was so focused on my anger, embarrassment and fear, I lost sight of what I was supposed to be really thinking about and really doing – my writing.

So tomorrow, I can go back to the place where I was embarrassed and I can hold my head high. I don’t have to think about what happened yesterday, because it’s not important.  It was never important.  It was just a huge, useless and pointless distraction.  The Enemy almost got me again, but I’m back.

Thank you, God.

Thank you, Muse. 

Once again I’ve been rescued from despair because God and my Muse were with me.  The only question I have is why it took so long.  Perhaps I was tired.  Perhaps I was playing old recordings of how this incident would lead to disaster.  Perhaps I just needed time to let the lesson sink in more deeply.  Perhaps the pain was my friend so that the next time something similar happens, I will remember the lesson.  Perhaps I just needed to Get Started and Keep Going no matter how I felt.  Perhaps I needed to Get Started and Keep Going until the answer came.    What matters most is that the answer did come.  I just needed to sit with my Muse and not let anything else distract me.