What Gets You Out of Bed in the Mornings? (especially when you don’t feel like it)

Consistency…

Very rarely does a weekend come and go and I have nothing to write.

But Saturday I didn’t feel it, Sunday I didn’t feel it and now it’s Monday.

The commitment I have to write weekly is always there in the background, not as a nagging ‘to-do’ but as something I want to do, with a lightness of ease, rather than a heaviness of ‘should do’. So here I am, wondering what to write, or whether I’ll even write anything at all.

Sure, I could make excuses. I could say

Oh I’ve had the flu (true!)

but when I look objectively, it isn’t that I haven’t written anything–I’ve started three different posts–it’s that I don’t have the enthusiasm for any of them enough to want to complete and press ‘publish’ on this post.

And so it is sometimes: we just don’t feel like it, and yet still we turn up.

And that’s the part that makes me laugh (mostly at myself!).

I sat down this morning and words are coming out, even though I thought they wouldn’t. It reminded me of those bigger actions we take: continuing to offer lunch whether my son eats it or not, continuing to do our job, to push our project forward inch by inch, whether we see results or not.

It seems to me that there’s a primeval (some would say a divine) desire to move, the very force that gets us out of bed in the mornings — knowing that we are meant to be doing something.

Which means that what we do is of so much less importance than ​the fact that​ we do.

The alternative is that we stay caught in our thoughts, that we stay tied in a muddle of ‘should I do this?’

Or, ‘why not this?’

Or, ‘if only I had X...’ (often showing up as clarity, purpose, knowing what to do, finding the magic pill solution…) ‘then I would feel better and I’d be able to get on with it.’ (whatever ‘it’ is!)

When really, my friend, it’s simply reaching out a hand of connection and saying,

I don’t feel on top of the world right now, so my ideas mostly appear to me to be rubbish, and probably are. But, you know what, that feeling will pass. Let’s just sit down together and see what shows up.

Because Here’s What I Know:

I know that,

When I start, something happens.

When I ask, someone has an answer.

When I care less about my own not knowing, or my own lack of ideas, something shows up. A spark, a person, an email, a question.

I know that the world is in perpetual creation whether we feel like joining in or not.

Party Games!

Sometimes I’m reminded of a bad party game at a family gathering. You try to protest, but you’re pulled to your feet by your favourite uncle and, you know what, it’s kinda fun when you let go of your self-consciousness and just join in.

It’s part of this wonderful thing called ‘life’ that is ever-flowing, ever-graceful, ever-joyful. The life that pulls us to our feet and has us dancing, even when we don’t feel like it.

With love,

Cathy 

P.S. I wrote this a week or so ago and judged it as ‘too self-indulgent’ to post. It was, though, the only writing I had to read out in an Emerging Voices class I’m doing (and only then because of ‘the recovered files’ function in Word!) Once spoken it seemed more relevant — we all have bad days, and it simply means we’re having a human experience, nothing more, nothing less. Enjoy your week, wherever you are on the scale of being human!