On Transitions: A Frisson of Recognition

Today I kept flipping through the various zero drafts in which I'd written about transitions, looking for the hook for today's piece. I wasn't seeing anything obvious, and I was feeling the pressure of getting the piece written and published (because I'm not breaking that promise, oh no), and so I decided instead to dive into working on today's zero draft, aiming to explore what it was that was getting in the way. Once I got into the writing I could let myself feel the writing and what the writing was bringing up, and I started to recognize that part of the challenge of the transition into writing is that writing carries within it a whole array of complex emotional valences far beyond "the physical act of organizing letters into words into sentences so as to talk about something." I began to notice that the challenge of making that transition is energetically in many ways similar to the challenge of dealing with clutter, which is another something that I've struggled with and have been trying to deal with, and I started writing about how piles of clutter aren't just the obvious stuck energy that pile implies, that actually, as long as you remain aware of that pile, as long as it continues to impinge on your consciousness, then it is drawing in energy via the recognition that, "Shit, that pile is still there," which means that the stuck energy contained in clutter actually increases over time. (And woe be unto you if you manage, one way or another, to stop noticing it, for at the point that it ceases to enter your awareness you have suddenly crossed the boundary that leads to "hoarder.") When I started to direct that realization back toward the challenge of starting writing every day, and how much emotional stuff it seems to bring up again and again and again, I began to feel a particular frisson of recognition, that of approaching the boundary of writing about something very interesting indeed.

And so this here right now is a teaser (for you and for me as well) of some I think exciting and important stuff to come.

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