You Are Not Ready
Hello again, brothers and sisters. It might not be time yet, after all ⏳
This essay is a contribution to the third Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium, a monthly collaboration from STSC's writers around a set theme. Our topic in July 2022 is Procrastination.
You tell yourself that the moment will present itself, when you are finally prepared to unleash the perfect artistic assault. The muses will sing sweetly in your ear as you compose the devastating beauty you always knew you were capable of. Friends and enemies will marvel as your business ventures flourish and your investments appreciate. The glory that awaits you will be unmatched if you only bide your time. This elusive moment has been outrunning you steadily for months or perhaps years, always just beyond the limits of your daily grasp. The thought of becoming a parent or moving away from your hometown is exciting and attractive, even though the thought of ceasing birth control this morning or buying boxes and packing tape this afternoon feels as momentous and terrifying as flying to the moon. Because the moment of decision is a confrontational fork in reality, a supreme instance of testing that reveals truths we have long suspected and feared. And when we step back from the edge defeated, filled with rationalizations and explanations as to why the moment isn’t yet right, we are revealing our true priorities and desires.
Whole industries exist to dress up our fear in respectable trappings, to make us feel much further down the path to our supposed dreams and goals than we actually are. Plenty of teachers and peddlers will happily give you advice and guidance that seems purpose-built to guide your focus anywhere but on the fearful task at hand. It’s difficult to sell courses to those busy doing their work, I suppose. And so simple garden variety fear is labelled respectable procrastination, symptom of creative geniuses throughout history. Proof that our ungestated, unconceived work will one day shine with vindicative brightness. It would be so much more humbling to just admit the truth. After all, fear has its uses and reasons, but truth will set us free. It’s time to admit where we really are.
Asserted: Procrastination is Fear Speaking
You’re not preparing, learning, biding your time for the perfect moment. You’re afraid. The feeling of absolute blockage and impossibility that strikes whenever you confront the enormity of beginning is just plain old garden variety fear. The reasons behind the feeling and the various ways it can present itself are uniquely personal, but they can all boil down to the same root cause. Fear of failure, or hard work, or public exposure, or personal shame, or others’ opinions, is still just fear. Haven’t you noticed that the desire to prepare and fiddle around and optimize never strikes until there’s work to be done? Strange that our minds are perfectly content to allow us to idle about in safe inaction but our brain becomes a beehive of anxiety only and always on the doorway of action. What does this tell us? What are we actually afraid of? Just because the answer might be different for me than for you doesn’t let either of us off the hook. The tragedy of literal decades spent in rationalizing our fears, dressing up one of our basest and weakest drives in noble clothes, ought to haunt us. It’s perfectly normal to be ashamed of time wasted on fear that we don’t even have the courage to name. The fact that somebody is very interested in human beings remaining trapped in a state of weakness and degeneracy is so plainly obvious that even the Petersons and Pressfields of the world can acknowledge it without treading too close to true religion. The regularity of it is too predictable for coincidence. You should be suspicious of the fact that even the first thoughts of beginning a good work pull the pin on a spiritual grenade of anxious paralysis in your life.
Of course starting the work is scary. It’s the beginning of an uncontrolled journey that will almost certainly require a lot of you, including quite possibly personal discomfort and change. Feeling the fear isn’t what should engender shame, it’s the impulse to disguise our true feelings and masquerade them as some form of performative merit. No one faults the person standing at the base of Everest in awe of the perilous ascent, and the wisest of old mountaineers will probably confirm the correct attitude in the face of real danger. But nobody respects the person shuffling supplies around basecamp and reworking their seventeenth detailed plan of ascent while polishing an online profile as a mountaineer, either.
Asserted: Perhaps Your Intentions are Not True
Take a moment to examine yourself with brutal honesty. Nobody is more aware of your own dodges than you, after all. Are you really ever going to begin? And more than that, at the root of yourself, is beginning really something that you want to do? Perhaps I can be the gentle voice that helps you to realize what you really have known for some time. Maybe you don’t want to be an artist. Maybe this career is good enough for you after all. Maybe you aren’t really such a spiritual person. Because if you were going to take the plunge, I think you know we wouldn’t be having this strange asynchronous conversation. You would be too busy. You would be tearing through your work with feverish intensity because you don’t have the option of stopping, because you have something real to accomplish. Beginning would be less of a problem than stopping. And if you’re not there, maybe it’s time to accept your true goals, the ones you are really living out daily and momentarily. Maybe you are more in love with being the kind of person who would do that sort of thing than you are with the drudgery and commitment that is involved. Or maybe someday will really and truly be different, but today just isn’t the time. I hope that I’m being merciful, exposing you to the truly loving confrontation that will expose the uncomfortable truths within. I’ve often warned you that our purpose here is to radicalize you.
These realizations are not negative and disappointing. There is great freedom in letting go of hobbies and pursuits that you once felt compelled to engage in but now realize are not truly your desire or enjoyment. Don’t be dishonest with others or yourself. It will cause you constant pain to continue a gradual accretion of tiny lies. And every time you tell yourself “I really want to get to that” but prove the opposite by your actions, you further the dissonance. Walk uprightly, fail genuinely, accept honest grace. Rest is good, not all action is productive. But let’s be constantly aware of our own true intentions. And when our desires are not as they should be, it’s time to humbly acknowledge our need for change.
Resolved: To Clarify and Confront My Real Fear
I have a confession. I’ve been trying to irritate you. And I pray that the last few paragraphs succeeded for some of my patient readers. If you are truly the kind of person who will set out on the long path towards adventure, then everything I say to dissuade you will only strengthen your resolve. And if I can persuade you to stop creating or working or trying, then I should. Because not everyone is supposed to be doing everything. Frankly, our constant valorizing of artistic achievement and extreme modes of life is a part of the massive problem. Every one of you that I can convince to lay down the brush or the pen and take up a quieter life of routine and peace is a small victory too. Everyone posturing and pretending because we all feel that we should be creating something, anything, is a recipe for disappointment and artistic mediocrity. There’s no more value in a true businessman making constant attempts at dutiful poetry than in a true poet spending his life settling down as a businessman. Both are acting from fear.
If you’re still reading, and you’re still angry, then you’re probably one of the few people who truly ought to be making things for others. You’re not so special, and your art isn’t intended for your personal fulfillment journey. Your art is to be an overflow of the sight you’ve glimpsed of the world, a lens for us all to see Truth and Beauty. What if you’re not really procrastinating, or disorganized, or just so very busy? What if you’re afraid? What if fear that you’ll never properly illuminate the dreams in your heart is trapping you before you set out? It’s an understandable fear. It confronts me every time I face the empty screen and the blinking cursor. But if that’s the whole point, if the entire purpose of your art is to serve us by deepening our understanding of Good, then how dare you deprive us for one more day?
WGMI 😎
Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel. ~ Steven Pressfield, Do the Work
To another he said, "Follow me." But he said, "Lord, let me first go and bury my father." And Jesus said to him, "Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Yet another said, "I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home." Jesus said to him, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God." ~ Luke 9:59-62
I am a new reader here but I already get the feeling that you are my impersonal personal coach. Do you do personal coaching or does "read the Bible, pray and work diligently daily" suffice?
Beautiful.
Some days I resist and then I think of the elves and their melancholy:
"The world has changed.
I see it in the water.
I feel it in the Earth.
I smell it in the air."
Other days I realize that this is who I am - I must create.