Understanding and accepting writing resistance
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
The last couple of days, I’ve felt odd. I’m trying to think of how to explain it. I’m at the end of the semester with my students. Yesterday, I wrote the final exam. Sometimes, as something ends, emotions pop up out of nowhere. Happiness. Relief. The ‘what-now’ question leaves an empty feeling inside.
I believe the uncertainty of our times contributes the weird or odd feeling.
But it’s not just because we’re all going through a bizarre worldwide shift now. Anytime we reach a crossroads in our life or notice that life is changing. Our kids are growing up way too fast. Our jobs or careers are no longer fulfilling. Maybe the loss of a loved one. Anytime we don’t know what our next step is going to be, we get this uneasy feeling inside. It’s not a bad feeling. It’s just…uneasy.
My limited Buddhist training tells me that the way to move past these feelings of uneasiness is to let go of wanting to know what will happen next. Being open without expectations is the best way to deal with uncertainty.
I really like the way Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön explains our resistance to uncertainty in her article, The Fundamental Ambiguity of Being Human. She writes:
“Our discomfort arises from all of our effort to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness.
Another word for this is freedom — freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human”
Since feeling uneasy or uncertain is normal and these feelings can hit us at any time, I think it’s important for writers to learn to work through these moments.
When this has happened to me in the past, I forced myself to write. I noticed that my feelings of ambiguity seeped into my novels. My characters behaved ‘out-of-character’ or seemed overly melancholic. I allowed myself to write the scenes however they came out; knowing that they’d either be fantastic or need to be re-written completely.
What I didn’t want to do was not write at all.
Even though I didn’t feel like writing, I did it anyway.
A few days or weeks later, I would reread what I’d written and be able to judge if it was good or not. Honestly, most of the time it wasn’t good. Melodrama isn’t a good thing.
But what was good was that I kept writing and the habit of working no matter how I was feeling trained my mind that there are no excuses. I write no matter what. Even if I’m feeling uninspired or not myself.
I wanted to share this because I believe we all have days when we feel like we really don’t want to write, we don’t want to work, we don’t want to work out, we don’t want to do the things we know need to get done.
Another Buddhist teaching, and one that is echoed in other faiths as well, is to be compassionate with others and with ourselves. In fact, I love this quote from Buddha:
“You can search the whole tenfold universe and not find a single being more worthy of love and compassion than the one seated here — yourself.”
So, get your work done, but don’t be hard on yourself if the result isn’t optimal. On these off-days, it’s fine to know that you simply got the writing or your job done, even if it’s not perfect.
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