If consciousness means anything, it means learning how to interact with the pressure that comes along with being human. Using it to my advantage, not just letting it build out of control because I am wired in to old ideas about how Life Should Be.
I swim in our Endless Pool daily, thinking about writing. Noticing so many other admonitions from other writing coaches and writers: just write, you must! Frequent reminders with lots of pushing energy.
Nothing wrong in any of that, but I am sensitive to pressure. Call me old school if you like, but I actually enjoy many aspects of protocol, etiquette, and keeping my commitments to others.
So I feel the pressure of commitments I have made to others and I do my best to honor them. My client and nonprofit donation work come ahead of my personal pleasure if there is a Saturday available and I am behind. It is a chain reaction of course because I perhaps scheduled too optimistically or sometimes people die – literally – and there goes a week of time I had planned to use otherwise.
So for my writing – something that to me feels so precious – I don’t want it to be filled with negative pressure energy. I want to to be filled with ease energy when I write – as that is part of my subject matter.
In the pool every day I think about it, I get ideas – I jot them down afterwards in Evernote – and some days I take more time than less filling out the scope of the idea. Most days I just put down the bullet points and a few tags or save a link from something that fills out the case I am making for one of my ideas.
I then move my attention from writing as I feel the pressure to prep for a 10 am training or a report is that is promised or a meeting I agreed to attend or even host.
This type of conversation is why I don’t read too much of the writing people. One or two mild “you should” messages and my small self goes to town all dressed up in Self-Righteousness on the Criticism Bus. I actually only read one person right now – and usually only the title not the body of her emails and posts. This is because I am studying how she crafts her words with her emotions – she is very effective in that regards.
Don’t worry Roxanne – remember that is exactly not the point. Enjoy the pressure you feel building – the ideas coming to you, the desire, the concepts that are forming – and stop thinking you Must Act Now on All of Them. The times are teaching this. I am helping you pave the way for a divine space to allow this writing – these ideas, this stuff that may or may not morph into a book (it could be something else, who knows) – to come to you in Its Own Time. No Pressure Required. No Pressure Desired.
There is So Much that is being created – to be consumed in theory by someone somewhere. It is Possible To Do Anything now – just go to YouTube and look up how! This creates enormous pressure for all you newbies to this level of freedom and of opportunity. It is of little use to enforce last century’s rules and guidelines – no matter how insightful and useful they were to you all previously.
Now is the time for a new manual. The skill to be learned first and foremost is to Relax. Now that you can search for anything, you don’t have to save it to your personal nest. Now that you can learn how to do anything, anytime, you don’t have to do it all this week. Now that you, Roxanne, have skills others want, that are in short supply, you don’t have to say yes to everyone, you can, in fact YOU MUST (for your own sanity, which leads to consciousness for others via this osmotic quantum learning that is taking place at ever rapid pace) think about and set your terms.
Then stand by them as You Both PRACTICE how it is to be a human in the midst of this massive transition in consciousness. Now go post this to your blog and have a nice day!
Whew! That felt awesome! And look how much nuance there is to p-r-e-s-s-u-r-e! Now, to limit myself to 5 minutes to find an image to accompany this post. That is one of the areas where I fall for the “perfect is the enemy of the good” thing.
Photo Credit: Me! Pressure moves up and down all day and all night long in our world, and it is especially visible to me in this sunrise on Maui. You can Favorite on Flickr if you like.
I always enjoy your writing Rox…you have the ability to distill your thoughts into words with elegance and simplicity. A true gift.
I also agree about the (self induced) pressure to write, being counter productive. I made a decision this year to write on my blog, only when it felt like a JOY to do so. No looking at stats, no wondering if people will forget about me if I don’t write, no pressure. If the joy and flow aren’t there, then I don’t write. I’ve had a lot of wordless weeks go by but I’m becoming more comfortable with this.
(I call living consciously in the world, being “the monk in the marketplace” as opposed to the old paradigm of “the monk in the cave”.) Your words are a gift Roxanne…thank you for writing from your heart.
Monk in the Marketplace is a great concept Kate. It allows for the fluidity of moving between what could be extremes – but essentially allowing grace to guide you each day on the specifics of what and how!
I do carve out time to write, research and edit images each weekend and a few weeknights but for me it is a segway or a bridge from the pressures of my profession to engaging my creativity. It’s good for my soul in other words 🙂 My writing is much lighter in topic generally than yours so it is also a different thing. The longer essays need to arrive organically and can’t be forced very much in the way you’ve described above. I do maybe only two of those a month.
I always have work undone and could work seven days a week and still never be done so I’ve had to learn to establish those boundaries or else I will never write. But you and I, our situations are completely different. Having your own business is not the same as what I do. I also do what I must to meet deadlines/deliverables I’ve committed to but know I can’t possibly meet all the to dos that I haven’t agreed to but have landed on my plate so some must go by the wayside for my own health and sanity.
I read here and there about writing but often feel much of it is a bit stuffy for me (according to most writing articles, my use of stuffy is poor writing, I should be inserting a metaphor to avoid reader fatigue while impressing them with my intellect concurrently).
In regards to personal workflow, my opinion is that we all need a system but a system flexible enough so it can be adapted to what works best for us. What works best for one writer’s workflow may not work for another. What is productive for one person could inihibit creativity in another. And the it’s ok to say no part? I completely agree with that and it’s easier once we say it aloud. Many of us are programmed to say yes for whatever reason (our desire to help, scarcity, fear). It is so helpful for me to write down or say out loud that I will not say yes to everything. To go further, I establish some guidelines to help me decide what is a no also.
Tania – I find your regular writing such an inspiration. What I am learning is that some things in my life respond really well to my Capricornian sense of discipline whereas other things really want to be much more fluid.
I will say I have been writing up a storm since I made this blog post – and it feels like a nice reward or validation for putting the thoughts out there. Reading about writing – tread lightly! Basically I am using it only for when I want inspiration – not because I feel I must to be a member of the club.