A few days ago, I began writing this blog post, for the newly recreated website —welcoming you. It was important to do it really well, so that you would like it and you would want to come back. You might like it so much that you would share it with a friend! It needed to be great. Of course, I was not writing it. I was stuck.
The day outside was beautiful, 72 degrees, perfect walking weather. My friend Linda texted, inviting me to walk. I said No, I wanted to write this post. I also wanted to try a new 50 minute yoga routine my teacher, Michelle, had recorded on my phone.
Instead I ate leftover Chinese food for lunch and watched a couple of episodes of Ted Lasso. As I was sitting on my sofa doing this I knew it was not what I wanted to do. I knew I was trying to avoid finding out that my blog post wouldn’t be good enough. For me, procrastination, always equals fear.
The day before, Seth Godin’s new book The Practice arrived on my doorstep. A quote early in the book is “we become what we do”. We do the practice of what we do because that is who we are. Whether we feel like it or not, we do the practice. Your list of practices are different than mine. I am a therapist, I see clients (virtually right now) in the spare bedroom of my home. I am a poet, writer, singer, wife/friend/sister/mother. And starting today, I am a blogger who will share some of what I have learned and continue to practice about how to get unstuck.
I turned off the television, changed my location (more on that later) from the sitting room on the first floor to my office on the second floor where my computer was waiting for me. I wrote a shitty first draft of this blog. Thank you, Anne Lamott. Then I went to the mat for 50 minutes of yoga during which my neck stopped aching.
Getting unstuck requires waking myself up to what I am doing to stay stuck and getting up and moving.
