Less at Stake — Write on, regardless.

Like countless others, I am starting this blog post with the apology “I know I haven’t written in months, but I’ve been busy with life and stuff…”

But its really true — sort of. You could also say I have procrastinated and started and deleted this post a half dozen times over the past ten weeks or so. Or started writing it, hit a speedhump, and then drifted into self doubt and realized I should be doing something more meaningful and lasting and cut it short.

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I wrote a post about me being lost and completely, hopelessly drunk before a date when I was 22 — and slurring and falling over by 630pm — so the girl and I never even had a chance. It was a sad, pathetic dirge to the loss of potential and crisis of confidence that drinking was for me.

But I don’t write about being drunk anymore — that was an older, obsolete model of myself. I can still feel the splinters of that old self lodged inside my consciousness, like schrapnel or shotgun pellets under my skin. Old scars — just not who I am anymore.

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I wrote about morning yoga — and uncurling and opening my heart through my shoulders and feeling the waves of intensity and glowing blood wash over me as I stretch and bend. Of the complete immersion that yoga allows me — that crystal silence where I can melt my mind into my body and focus on the edge of deep stretch and tiptoe along it without teetering into suffering.

But I lose myself in the description and the rapture of the words becomes so poetic and musical and I get self conscious. Again — my little right finger reaches upwards and to the right to the delete button.

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I wrote about the weight of being and how I saddle myself with such an expectation and onerous burden of — whatever the project is — that I stall and procrastinate and falter at the starting line. The anxiety of launch and the fear of letting an imperfect creation go keeps me in development stage.

Instead I run non stop for an hour — settling into the steady rhythm of my footfall and feeling as though I have some sense of completeness by running up and down the cliffs near the beach.

Back home, after a shower, my body flushes with feel good chemicals and I lie down with that delicious lightness of being physically spent. I have created and completed — but still nothing on the page.

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I still haven’t written that post. But the latest post now has today’s date and I feel as though there is less at stake — as though I have briefly parted the curtains on my sense of stuck and overwhelm.

There is less at stake — truly — it’s only life and the passing of time and strangling the juice out of the fruit doesn’t make for a sweet drink. So I got there, and even now, looking down as the words ebb along the screen, it’s calling me back, like there’s something unfinished…

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This originally published (finally — phew) at BrenMurphy.net please pop up and contribute with a valued, precious comment.