It's not writer's block Tuesday October 24, 2006, 0 comments

It is not writer’s block. Writer’s block is fraught with frustration. Anger. The writer gets upset that she cannot write, and this anger toward herself feeds the stress that prevents her from writing. She is burnt out.

But not this time, she muses. Not burnt out at all.

She seems to have reached some strange zen state, in which the mind flits like a bird from strand to strand of thought. The mind doesn’t stop. She has thousands of thoughts, but none of them vie for attention, none of them seek to stand out from the crowd. She is at peace with her mind, and it in turn is in peace with its self.

Many new agers seem to want to stop the mind thinking, expecting some terrific clarity to come from this state of empty-mindedness, but she sees the fallacy in this line of reasoning. Most certainly the clarity might come, but the instant it does, it destroys the empty-mind state. It’s very existence denies its manifestation.

She doesn’t want to stop thinking, to reach the empty-mind state. Instead she lets her mind drift, finding its own course and balance. Clarity comes from balance, from untethering the mind from process and letting it roam free of expectation.

Images and memories come unbidden to her, but don’t insist themselves on her – they fail to lock, happy to float by and be seen.

And then she opens her eyes, puts finger to key, and starts to type:

“It’s not writer’s block…”


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Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.”
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