My intention, I want you to know, was to win yesterday. I won the whole day before. I planned to keep my streak alive.
I went to bed inspired, slept deliciously late, and had a sense that the day was a big open field to explore and enjoy. The items on my agenda were completely manageable. I had the goal of exploring a work opportunity in Breckenridge. And of course I wanted to get a few turns in–even with very little terrain open, winter having come so late here, there’s something wonderful about the mountain being empty enough that there’d never ever be a lift line.
Most of all I wanted to get a bunch of writing done. I had a good and simple idea for that day’s piece and a solid initial draft for it; I had every reason to expect that it would be easy to get my piece up for the day. And drafting, which is like a stream of water that sometimes gets dammed up and sometimes flows burblingly down the mountainside has of late found itself burbling right up to and over the edge of a cliff. It has been a rushing waterfall.
So I expected that it would be a deeply productive day. I expected that I’d finally be able to get ahead with my pieces. That I’d take my draft printouts and start figuring out ways to find angels in those blocks of marble. Looking back, this should have drawn me in, because it would have been easy, and because it would have been easy it also could have been fun, and I should be drawn into fun. Choosing fun should be the easiest thing in the world.
But somehow it went awry. It went awry from the earliest part of the morning, and I never got it back on track. The ‘how’ of that awry doesn’t matter too much; I had every intention and opportunity to bring it back, but I never did. Evening came. After some indeterminate time lost in my favorite videogame, I found myself looking at the clock, and it was nearly 9pm, and I hadn’t made dinner yet, and I knew that while I’d get done what I needed to get done for the day, I had squandered an opportunity. Okay, I said. Too bad. I’ll do better tomorrow.
I slept deeply last night but woke up much earlier than I prefer, and soon I was aware that my mind was telling me there was something I needed to explore. That what had happened yesterday was classic avoidance behavior on my part. And as I’d been experiencing it, I’d seen it as avoiding the writing, which, I’ll be honest, even as well as the work has been going for the last two years, I avoid the work all the time. Yes, I always get it done. But there’s a lot of procrastination.
But there was no reason to avoid the writing yesterday. It should have been so easy as to have the potential to be actually joyful. (Writing joyfully. What a concept!) So in those wee hours of first wakefulness, still hoping to get back to sleep, through my reflection on vivid dreams (about nothing obviously related at all–we were trying to keep a couple of sharks alive in an unusually big bathtub), it became clear that it wasn’t the writing that I was avoiding. Avoiding the writing was just a symptom. What I was avoiding was something much bigger. Big enough that I was struggling to get some perspective on it.
A story: I went to college in Connecticut, and one time I was at a party and I met a dude who grew up in Santa Fe. (We New Mexicans were pretty rare in that part of the country.) “Oh, did you like it there?” I asked him. “I hated it,” he said. “There’s nothing big there.” I knew from something he’d said earlier in the conversation that, like many people in that part of Connecticut, the Mecca toward which he prayed was New York City. So I knew what he meant. But still, that utterance was a form of idiocy, and I needed to let him know. So I said to him, “Did you somehow manage to miss the mountains?”
There’s a way that sometimes, when something is big enough, we can find a way not to see it. You need a certain perspective to see the really big things.
Do I have that perspective? Maybe. But on some level I know that whether I am seeing clearly, or whether I am keeping my eyes closed to not see, I have still seen enough. I have seen the avoidance, if not entirely the thing or things I am trying to avoid. The defining characteristic of my avoidance is that I make easy things hard. Thus I do not need, right now, to wait until I fully see all that I am avoiding. All I need to do is a simple practice of allowing. I just need to let allow the easy things to be easy, and the energy will flow.