Master of Distraction
I have writer’s block. It’s been a while since I’ve been motivated to write anything. I will find any excuse to be too busy to write. In my spiritual teachings, I am learning that this is coming from a voice inside called the EGO which stands for Edging God Out. The amazing Doreen Virtue (www.AngelTherapy.com) teaches that the bigger your life’s purpose, the louder your EGO is. My EGO has been pretty loud lately, telling me things like “Why bother writing a blog or a book when hardly anyone will read it… or worse… they won’t like it anyway.”
So then I find things to distract myself from even thinking about sitting down to write and I am starting to realize that this is all from the EGO too – pesky little thing! So my EGO is the Master of Distraction and here are few things it likes to tell me to keep me from my purpose:
You are a Mom therefore you need to focus only on your child’s needs instead of your own… there simply isn’t time to write as a Mom.
You have so much to do that you better take a l-o-n-g time to write out a l-o-n-g list of all the things you have to do.
How can you sit down to write when there are dishes in the sink and 4 loads of laundry to wash? Oh, and you better vacuum. The whole house. I think the floor boards could use a scrubbing too. Might as well clean out your closet as you put the laundry away…
Did you get that e-mail reply you’ve been waiting on? Not yet? Well, you better clean out your entire e-mail inbox RIGHT NOW. And the junk mail... all 1,056 messages. Better go through each one instead of deleting them all at once.
Don’t you have a ton of work to catch up on for the charity? Shouldn’t you be planning your next fundraiser and writing thank you notes and grants instead of writing for a silly blog? Or writing your book? Who is going to read it anyway?
In an interview on one of my favorite podcasts by Jessica Ortner, Adventures in Happiness, she asks Mike Dooley how he writes his Notes From the Universe. He explains that he has to simply start by writing SOMETHING… anything, really… he just has to take that first step. (I am paraphrasing - he is far more eloquent - but you get the point.)
So this blog is an example of how I am finally pushing the voice of the EGO aside and writing whatever comes out. And although I confess I vacuumed my entire house before sitting down to type – and yes, EGO, you somehow convinced me that I even needed to clean the floorboards – I did it. I finished this blog. And who cares if nobody reads this? I did it for ME. So take that, EGO!
