How often have you sat down, all excited to write but before your pen hit the paper your mind flooded with visions of what the piece of work could be? Should be? Better be? What happened to your voice? Your willingness to let your voice flow? Whenever that happens to me, the fun evaporates.
I call that writing in the future. To put it another way, obsessing about something I have no control over. Obsession of any kind is a prison. I sit there trapped inside, pages ahead of myself (without ever having written a single page). With my mind tangled, my flow blocked and my ideas short circuited, I need to reground myself in the present. This is what I know: When a stream of Self is emerging from deep inside the unconscious, it is energy trying to situate itself. For the writer, it’s words. For the fine artist, it’s images or color. For the mathematician, numbers and equations.
And so on.
These values only need to be expressed right now. We’ll consider them a little later, perhaps gently slide them around, reconfigure their appearance or meaning. But right now the words and images and equations only want to be seen—by their creator. You.
