Stuck = Pleasure Distance
My dear friend and writing partner Dee is still stuck. She hasn’t written a poem in months. Last night, at writing group, she said, opening her palms, “I have nothing.” She said she spent an enormous amount of time this week feeling bad that she wasn’t writing and it finally hit her: writing is a great pleasure. We can get so caught up in should be writing, not writing, not writing well trap, we forget it’s a pleasure and privilege. We enjoy writing. We live for it. Maybe, when we stop worrying about not writing, we make room for the pleasure to come back.
Dee came to her brilliant pleasure insight because of how her teaching has been going. All week, she was bogged down by humans behaving like humans; she was stultified by conversations where the word “rubric” was used, many many times, like a toothy trap. She had no rubrics. Rubric-less she felt wrong, wrong wrong.
Then she remembered: she loved teaching without a rubric. And she was stunned to realize in spite of how hard and annoying it all was, teaching was a great pleasure in her life, one of the sweet spots in the week. She loves teaching! Steer towards the pleasure.
Teaching and writing are our passions. We love them. When we are stuck, perhaps we have simply forgotten what we like so much. Perhaps we have taken on someone else’s idea for what we Should do.
When we are stuck, in teaching or in writing, the pleasure has become hidden. But it’s always there. It wants to come back.
What would make it fun today? How did you used to do it, when you first started this work? What is your favorite thing you have written? Could you not write and just remember how great it was to write that? Remembering the pleasure is the way back.
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