Resistance

It’s very early morning, before dawn
in fact. And while I tend to be an early-riser, this is a bit early even for
me. I was in bed for five hours. You’ll notice I didn’t say I slept five hours.
Sleep has been rather elusive of late. I slept, but fitfully, tossing and
turning and waking every hour or two. It seems to be another symptom of the
rough patch I’ve been going through.

The first being that it’s been more
than two weeks since I’ve posted anything. I want to want to write. The ideas
for posts pop into my thoughts frequently, and I’m collecting them in my mind
like pennies in a jar. Unlike pennies in a jar, their value doesn’t increase
with each addition to the collection. I know this, but…..(you knew there was a
but coming, didn’t you?) I’ve been in a bit of a funk in the last couple of
weeks and no amount of rationalizing all the reasons why I should be writing
has worked to effectively change the fact that I haven’t been able to bring
myself to do it.

I keep attempting to write, but I
don’t get very far and the words don’t flow. I’ve been giving myself a hard time
about it, that little voice in the back of my head nagging at me daily about
how I should be writing. Okay, so I finally got this blog up, and yes, the idea
of a blog is that you post to it regularly, but mentally flogging myself for
not posting isn’t, as you might imagine, making it any easier to write.

It’s a form of resistance. Something
I think we all do from time to time, when life or some particular situation isn’t
unfolding in quite the way we’d like it to. There’s a period of adjustment when
our vision for how things were “supposed” to be comes into direct conflict with
how they are. “Whoa, wait a second. Back up there….this isn’t how it’s supposed
to be. This isn’t how things were supposed to happen.” This may be accompanied
by an almost irresistible urge to throw a temper-tantrum, and come to think of
it, perhaps if we did just that we’d move through the resistance to what is,
more quickly.

There’s something to be said for
venting and releasing feelings in such an uninhibited way. No, I don’t mean as
adults we should be throwing ourselves on the floor kicking and screaming whenever
we don’t get our own way, but when life gives you what feels like lemons, as it
occasionally will, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, in the confines and
privacy of our own homes if we let ourselves pitch a fit. Perhaps we’d move on
more quickly to turning those lemons into lemonade. Three year olds don’t tend
to spend two weeks in a funk. They have a complete and immediate melt-down,
kicking, screaming, wailing…and then they pick themselves up off the floor and
moments later have moved on, smiling, content, off to the next thing, the old
grievance or upset processed and accepted, and then forgotten.

I’m a big believer in accepting what
is. I know intellectually that resisting what is serves only to create tension
and to increase pain and discomfort, but I think too, that it’s a process. I
don’t think I’m alone in finding that even once I’ve recognized the incongruity
between my desire and reality, acceptance doesn’t necessarily follow
immediately. I don’t think I’m alone either, in turning acceptance into one
more “should.” As in, “I should be able to just accept this and move on.” In
fact, I think that’s a big part of why, as adults, we often don’t shift from
resistance to acceptance as quickly as we could. I, at least, have a tendency
to attempt to skip the processing part, telling myself that I shouldn’t be
scared, shouldn’t be sad, shouldn’t be feeling whatever it is that I’m feeling
(there’s that resistance again), and it serves only to slow the process of
acceptance. It serves only to put me in what one of my dearest friends and I
call “a funk.” So for now, I’m trying to allow, to accept, that I’m in a funk,
that it’s part of the process, that it won’t last forever. I’m trying to be as
gentle with myself as I tell my friends and clients to be with themselves. The acceptance
will come. I’m just not quite there yet. Something tells me that if you’ve read
this far, you’ve been there a time or two yourself, and you’ll forgive me if I
don’t write as often as I “should” for a little while longer.

In the meantime, at least my windows are clean. Grandpa would be proud.