Why do I continue to write regularly despite the challenges and resistance it entails?

Often, I wish that I could figure out why I write these things each week. Often, I put off starting, until much later than I’d prefer. Here I am again this week, in the proverbial last hour. It’s a Sisyphean labor—there’s to be one each week, and there’s no end in sight. Yet, through the week I do many other things, until I have to admit that the thing I really want to do is write.

In 2014, feeling prematurely jaded at just 29, I planned a two-week ‘digital fast’, hoping to cure my weariness and professional despair. I’d worked as a freelance writer for startups, think tanks and business schools, producing mindless content in the name of ‘thought leadership’ and I’d grown embarrassed to contribute to a world in which ‘creative’ had become a noun, ‘journal’ a ponderous verb, and where Arianna Huffington’s recent book Thrive was taken for gospel. Still, it paid, and the perk was that I could work from anywhere, like one of those ‘digital nomads’ I had read about in the media, with their self-improvement manuals and minimalist aesthetic.

~ Drew Calvert, from Compassionate time

It’s as if the journey of self-discovery is universal. Good, I feel less freaked-out knowing that others bump up against “weariness and professional despair.”

When—despite your best efforts—you feel like you’re losing at the game of life, remember: Even the best of the best sometimes feel this way. When I’m in the pit of despair, I recall what iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut said about his process: “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” Don’t overestimate the world and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. And you are not alone.

~ Tim Ferriss

I’m uncomfortable criticizing Vonnegut… but that image! Why couldn’t it be “I feel like I’ve been tied to my chair, forced to type with my nose.” Because that’s how I feel when I’m writing. I know I’m not truly alone. (Hello, Dear Reader. But also, hello, countless other writers.) But it’s hard to believe that in my heart, when I feel I’ve tied myself to my chair and am trying to write with my nose.

In fact, I’ve let years of my life go by this way. I could be working on something I truly love, and then I’d hit a snag. I’d get frustrated, then avoid it for the rest of the day. I just wouldn’t want to be frustrated anymore, so I wouldn’t touch it. There’s always later. Perhaps if a better mood came along I’d be willing to tackle it.

~ David Cain from, Protect Your Dreams From Contamination

I’m not sure I agree with how easy it sounds the way Cain puts it. Still, he’s dead-on with the point. Here’s another spin on it, from the late, great, Jack Vance as Curly. Or you can have it in book form as, The One Thing.

Why are their pleasures uneasy? Because the motives upon which they are founded are not stable and they totter with the frivolity which gave them birth. … Laboriously they attain what they desire, anxiously they hold what they have attained, and in the meanwhile irrecoverable time is not taken into consideration.

~ Seneca

Earlier today I was listening to a podcast where two people were talking about constraints. For example: It’s not a European painting if it doesn’t have a canvas, a frame and paint. Every week I stare at the structure for these weekly missives (and the complex, refined process I have for writing them) and I think: Maybe I should just scrap all this cruft. Maybe I should just send out a numbered list of seven things. It would be vastly easier to just pass the quoted bits sans any commentary.

Then I snap out of it, and start again up the hill. Because they’re better with the canvas and a frame.

The learning strategy that has been used traditionally in school to teach students consists in focusing on one skill before moving on to the next one and is called blocking. But there is a better way: interleaving, which consists in practicing multiple parallel skills at once.

~ Anne-Laure Le Cunff, from The false promise of the 10,000 hour rule

I don’t feel I’m “interleaving” as I write these things. But I certainly do weave together many different sources and thoughts. (“Integrate” is a better word choice, but I’m leaving “weave” since it fits under the eave of the first sentence.) So then, structure and imperfection.

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.

~ Albert Einstein

It (both what Einstein points to and this writing) also fills this thinking person with a near paralysis. Fortunately, but the time I get about midway through the writing, the issue takes on a life of its own. In the second half, I feel like I’ve found some footing (in a pitch-black room full of trip hazards and loose Legos) and it becomes fun to grope around all my various collections and systems to see what comes up as relevant.

For example, just a bit of groping around for “hazard” leads me to…

I am often stuck in the resistance right before actually writing. It usually takes me several attempts to approach the work. It feels like walking up the slippery slope of a small hill, where the initial speed and direction has to be perfect, and then with continued effort—a penguin waddling judiciously—I reach the gently rounded top of the hill (after sliding off obtusely a few times and beginning again.)

~ Me, probably over-thinking it, in Issue № 56

Here at the end, I shudder to think that perhaps I continue to write regularly because I enjoy the challenges and resistance it entails.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

ɕ

PS: As an experiment, I assembled this issue’s 7 things as a numbered list. *shudder* It was so pointless and boring, I’m not even including it.