I got side-tracked with calls this morning and couldn’t pull off this post until 11am.
Not my ideal way to get this done. I didn’t even have a chance to make a coffee until just now, so my brain was mush and I definitely couldn’t ‘write’. But I did want to show up, nonetheless. “Showing up is half the battle”, apparently attributed to both Stephen Hawking and Woody Allen, says the internet.
And in fact when I did sit down to try this post, the coffee hadn’t kicked in yet and I was a sea of anxiety about a million other things. For me, anxiety doesn’t look like worry, as much as ‘monkey mind’ – my mind spinning out in a thousand directions. It’s doing things like creating problems, having future conversations, engaging in arguments for disagreements that haven’t yet occurred.
So instead of attempting this post right away, I journaled. Just a page. Honestly, I’m not sure if it helped or if the coffee finally kicked in, but I was able to sit and attempt to write what’s been produced above.
I thought in my head about that ‘showing up’ aphorism, and couldn’t imagine how much more difficult it would be to show up on less sleep, with children, with cancer…
But apparently that’s what the pros do. They write, or practice, or whatever – even when they don’t feel like it.
If you make it something that you HAVE to get done, I think it’s easier to show up even when you don’t feel like it. You don’t have a choice.
So here was my first public brush with that on this new blogging endeavor. I’m proud I got this out, and hope to extend this ‘showing up’ thing to other areas of my life and professional pursuits.