One morning, I rode my bike to my favorite Boulder coffeehouse to write, and on my bike ride over I was thinking about the work I was planning on doing. I had this image of sitting down and getting right to work.
Instead, I procrastinated. And that struck me as interesting. In my zero draft from that day, I wrote this: "What happened this morning when I intended to write and I thumbed through a magazine for a half-hour?"
That led to some interesting thoughts:
I wonder, now that I reflect on it, if the thinking/anticipating is another practice I've learned to do in order to not feel. If perhaps I am creating within my head a visualized experience of what the work is going to look like, and using that imagination as a way to avoid feeling what's happening right in the moment.
It struck me as a startling insight.
This has thus far been a very challenging week. I've really struggled with the transition back into my regular life from my time away.
So as we step into the discussion of the challenge of transitioning between not-writing and writing, these twin aspects combine into our jumping-off point. I'll articulate it as a question: When facing something that's making the writing difficult (e.g. this week's fatigue), does an imagined (positive, always positive) idea of how the work will go get in the way of actually meeting the moment?