“Your difficulties are not obstacles on the path, they are the path.” Ezra Bayda
We’ve all been there—had those times in our writing when nothing much seems to be happening. We feel stuck and can’t seem to move forward. Or the words we squeeze out of ourselves seem trite and unimaginative—as if we were writing by rote.
What to do? What to do? We can beat ourselves up about it, tell ourselves that we’re lousy writers and shouldn’t be in the game. All of which plunges us into a downward spiral where things go from bad to worse.
Or, we can embrace a more upbeat, enlightened mindset. We can simply relax and let go of all our self-judgment. We can just accept that the difficulty we’ve encountered is simply part of our path.
When we view difficulties as part of the natural progression of our writing journey, suddenly, miraculously, they lose their sting. Our struggle becomes part of our process—a rough patch that we need to get through. We’ve done it before and we can do it again. It’s no big deal, just a blip on the radar screen.
Here’s now Dinty Moore describes how view of this in The Mindful Writer:
“It helps me to think that I have a certain number of bad sentences stacked up inside of me (many, many bad sentences, I’m afraid). And they have to come out, like the dried glue often found at the tip of the tube, dried glue that has to be squeezed through the hole before you can access the good glue necessary to finish your current project.
“That may have been one of my bad sentences right there. It sounds rather clunky. And this goofy glue metaphor may not be working at all.
“But here is what I mean: If I have to squeeze those bad sentences out of my brain, out of my metaphorical writing tube, then I better get at it, better start squeezing.”
“With that logic, even the bad days are useful, even the obstacles are part of the path. Maybe I’m not writing anything worthy of preservation today, but if I am at my desk writing, then I am making progress, because tomorrow the tube will be emptied of bad sentences, and the good stuff can finally flow out onto the page.”
What a refreshing idea! Obstacles don’t obscure our path, they reveal it, because they are part of the journey we’re on.
How freeing this is to see obstacles as part of our path! On a day when we feel like nothing good is happening, we are actually making progress! So let’s start squeezing all that dried glue out. Write on!
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