The Big “Wait” Before Work

I want … something. 

 

A voice in my head tells me to pause, to wait before doing something “professional” with my day because something else needs to happen first. But I don’t know what, and can’t know what. 

 

I want to wait before working perhaps because I simply don’t want to work. I want the freedom to sit and read and wander, but I know, because I’ve learned, that when I have that I don’t do very well with it. I sit, and worry, and wonder what I’m good for.

 

I want to wait before working because I need to say something—to what, whom? There’s an impulse to pause, hesitate, be still, absorb … A fickle voice whispering, “If you wait … something could happen. Something big could happen!”

woman lying down on grass outside

Perhaps it’s just a pause I need to say something to myself: I’m here, I’m ready, and that is scary.

There is more than one of me. There is a dark and a light and the dark has a mind of its own, and it will try to get me to stop doing things, to wait … to prevent me from my working desires because its own private desire is to avoid pain at all costs. 

But it is childish, and it is foolish. It has no concept of time and grit and the pleasure earned from painful things. It sees discomfort as the enemy from years built upon avoiding discomfort before the light had grown enough to handle it. 

So now you are the adult, and you have learned that pain can be a prize, and to sit with it is heroic. 

And there you were, and you didn’t want to start working quite yet, and so you wrote. You wrote from amid the messy room of your mind and the truth—the real, light truth with a mind of its own—was able to find its way out from between false stories. 

That, there, is the magic of your art. That it will overcome the softness of fear if you just let it. 

But you have to let it.


Your thoughts? I’d love to hear ’em below (leave a comment!) … Oh, and get an email when I post something new.

Share This