Writer's block is just a lame excuse. To claim writer's block is to shift the blame, to avoid owning the problem. Something else, some unseen and uncontrollable force, is blocking you. If only that block was removed then writing would be so easy! Right?
When I was 12 years old I went to a friend’s house for a sleepover. Let’s call him Tom, not for any made up or privacy-based reason but because that was his actual name.
Tom and I always made the most of every sleepover. We went for a bike ride, played some backyard cricket, kicked a football around, and climbed some trees. By late afternoon we had really built up an appetite and Tom’s mum kindly asked me if I liked spaghetti...
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Read MoreBeing "out of your depth" is a preemptive excuse used by people who are afraid of failing. It's a fear-based mechanism to let everyone know that your current situation is new and challenging for you and you might suck at it and you want everyone to be prepared for that. Except it's bullshit.
Read MoreHave you ever felt as if your life was hurtling along at such speed that you barely had control over it? Or have you felt like a juggler with too many balls (or chainsaws) in the air? Or maybe you have just felt so stretched that you badly needed a rest? Don't worry I know the feeling all too well...
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My wife and I had made a last-minute decision to go out for dinner. We had dressed up, driven down to a riverside dining precinct and somehow managed to secure a table for two on what looked like their busiest night. Afterwards, we planned to watch a movie and then take a late night stroll by the river. It was going to be a great night. But, just after the entre came out, I felt a sudden twinge of pain in my back as I leaned against my chair. A pain that was all too familiar.
“Oh no. Not again.” I pleaded inside my head. “Not now.”
I tried pretending as if the pain wasn’t there, squashing down the dread that had welled inside me, and hoping with every fibre of my body that it was nothing to worry about. Maybe it was just a muscular pain? But it wasn’t.
And that is how I ended up at the hospital emergency ward late on a Saturday night (as if I had nothing better to do) waiting for the official confirmation of what I already knew. My lung had collapsed. Again.
Less than three months earlier I had been in the exact same hospital, talking to the exact same emergency doctor, feeling the exact same symptoms. That time, my collapsed lung (pneumothorax for those playing at home) had been treated by inserting a pipe into my chest to drain the air and reinflate my lung. It succeeded, but the doctor warned me that I was now a 30% chance of suffering a recurrence, and if I did so that I would require surgery on my lung.
So as I sat in the emergency room for the second time in three months I felt deflated (literally and metaphorically). I knew that I had suffered another pneumothorax and I knew that meant that I was going to require lung surgery. I felt a level of sadness creep into my body that I had not felt in a long time.
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The above story is all true. As I write this it just over three weeks since I had that surgery and my view on the world has certainly changed. The time spent recovering in hospital was a great time to think. I had many hours of silence and contemplation in which my mind could wander and explore possibilities about my life that I had previously ignored. As such, I learned a lot about myself and about life in general.
Here are the three biggest things I learned while I was recovering from lung surgery.
If you hadn’t already noticed, I’m a positive kind of person. I like to find the fun and happy side of every situation and I always try to maintain a positive outlook on life. Even when having surgery on a major internal organ...
Yes I had that initial jolt of sadness and negativity but I have since realised that feeling that is normal. It was a very negative situation and the natural response there is to feel those negative emotions. It is OK to feel sad about things.
Sadness is a good emotion to alert us that something is not right in our life, but it is only designed as an indicator for change. We are not supposed to dwell on it or use it as our main energy source in life. Sadness is there to show us that we don’t like something and that we need to do something about it.
When bad stuff happens we have a tendency to exaggerate just how bad it is. I didn’t like the fact that I had another collapsed lung but it certainly wasn’t the end of the world, or even the end of my life.
Bad things happen and sometimes we have no control over them. But that does not mean we should whinge and moan about them. Instead we can focus on what we can control and what positive changes we can make.
While I was in hospital a few friends came to see me, including a woman who works with kids that spend the majority of their time in hospital. She told me of this one kid, a small boy, who had a rare condition that affected his lungs and resulted in him constantly requiring a tube out the side of his chest. Here I was feeling annoyed about having the tube for 3 to 4 days and this poor kid had been in hospital for 3 to 4 months with it.
But you know what else that kid had? He still had fun. He played with the other kids, he ran around (with chest drain in hand), and he could still laugh and smile. He certainly didn’t enjoy having the chest tube in but he didn’t let it become a big deal either.
Bad stuff can happen just as randomly as good stuff. But one bad incident does not preclude us from future fun and happiness. One bad incident is not the end of the world.
Another insight I gained during my stay in hospital was the need to balance long-term satisfaction (or delayed gratification) with instant gratification. More importantly I realised the need for the attitude of being willing to sacrifice one for the other.
It is too easy to get caught up on only one form of gratification in our life without considering the other. Some people live their life just by focusing on what will make them happy in each instant. This can be a positive way to live in the short-term but with a complete lack of long-term thinking people in this category find it had to achieve big things in their life.
To achieve our goals and the success we dream of, we need to use delayed gratification. But living in a way where we focus completely on delayed gratification is not the answer either. We should not spend our time working so hard to achieve a future state of happiness that we miss out on opportunities to actually be happy now. There needs to be a balance.
My surgery is the perfect example of delayed gratification because it was always my choice to have it. I could have chosen to forgo the surgery and live with the constant possibility, and fear, that I would suffer a recurrence. Instead I chose to be proactive. I chose to experience some short-term pain and suffering (i.e. sacrifice my immediate happiness) in order to prevent it from happening again for the rest of my life. A few days of pain versus a lifetime of happiness…that’s the sacrifice and balance I’m talking about.
Sometimes the “quick win” of instant gratification can be what we need - living in the now, experiencing the injection of short-term happiness and the ability to forget about our worries and have fun. But at other times we need that long-term focus - the ability to delay our gratification, to push through short-term “suffering”, to work towards a greater goal, and achieve something that will ultimately provide much more happiness.
Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are. ~Arthur Golden,Memoirs of a Geisha
When experiencing adversity or hardship the key is to use it as a tool for reflection on our self. Adversity is the perfect excuse to think deeply about our life and create positive changes.
After all my thinking my head was hurting (maybe that was just the painkillers) but I felt good for it and I was back to my happy and positive self even in the face of adversity. I felt uplifted, having had the time to think about my life and coming to the conclusion that everything was still as good as I had thought. Except my lungs, but you can’t win them all.
It was midnight, and the long shadows cast by the waxing moon played havoc with my mind. Suddenly, the scene burst into light and I was thrust into the thick of the battle. Armed with nothing but a flimsy shoe and a can of bug spray I fought bravely against my 8-legged enemy. Spray, spray, parry, spray. He was a worthy foe. Sweat beaded on my forehead as we battled hard. We both knew that only one us would survive the night. The spider - angry and frenzied by my bug spray - changed his method and launched a direct attack. It caught me off guard and I only just managed to swing the shoe down in time, smacking it into the ground with an almighty roar.
Dust rose around me as the battlefield fell silent. I was victorious, but I was frazzled. It had been all too close this time and I could not shake the feeling of intense fear that had coursed through my body as the spider had approached...
Later that night, as I replayed the event in my mind, it somehow seemed less glorious. I was just another man killing another spider - a pretty simple task that men achieve around the world without the same level of dramatisation. It was then that I realised just how irrational and useless fear is.
Fear is not a rational thought. Fear is a creation of the imagination - a fictitious future filled with pain and suffering. It is just a negative lens for looking at the future, and it pays little regard to logic or common sense. This makes fear irrational and useless.
Think about my battle with that spider. I would easily be 1000 times bigger, have enough force to crush it with just two of my fingers, and also have access to chemical sprays (and footwear) that kill spiders easily. What did the spider have? Eight legs, some venom that wouldn't even hurt me, and a creepy looking face. Yep, fear is irrational alright…
But don't we use fear to protect us from dangerous situations? Doesn't fear stop us from getting hurt? Isn't our ability to feel fear a major component of our human survival instinct? No, and this is a common misconception that confuses fear with our ability to sense danger.
Take fire for example: when we look at fire we know that it is dangerous - we know that we could be severely hurt, or even die, if we touch it. But we do not fear it. We just recognise and understand the danger the fire presents and we adjust our actions accordingly. This is our danger sense in action and it has played a key part in the longevity of the human race.
Fear, on the other hand, is stress about a possible future state that may or may not actually occur. It provides no evolutionary benefit and I will go as far as to say it actually hampers our natural survival instinct.
In previous ages, when humans were not such a dominant force on the planet - when we had to hunt and gather food whilst avoiding deadly predators - a sense of fear would have actually been a major detriment to our survival.
Think of a time when you were in the clutches of a very strong sense of fear. What sort of reaction did it cause in your body? Were you thinking clearly and able to control your actions? Or did it feel like you were lost in your fear, as if your body had stopped paying attention to you?
There is a reason why authors use phrases like "frozen with fear" and "paralysed with terror". ;)
Fear, does not serve any positive purpose. Why? Because it is just a form of worrying about the future, rather than focusing on what is happening right now. If you do not live in the moment, if you are not acutely aware of your surroundings then how can you make the right decisions in order to survive? How will you recognise danger and know how to respond?
Unfortunately our modern society does not have as many immediately threatening dangers and people are getting too comfortable. The result is a decrease in the usage of our ability to sense danger and an increase in the silly and wasteful concept of fear. Just the other day I saw a lady nearly lose her life simply because "her mind was elsewhere" and she stepped out in front of oncoming traffic. I would bet everything I have that she was worrying about the future, rather then paying attention to the current moment.
Writing this article led me to research what common fears people have and I found what are supposedly the top 10 fears across the world. These are:
Reading through that list do you think it is the actual event listed that is feared or a series of imagined (and improbable) outcomes from those events? I'd say it's the latter.
People do not fear the act of flying per se, but they fear the possibility of something going wrong mid-flight and the plane crashing. For public speaking, people do not fear the act of saying words to others but instead fear that they will make mistakes and/or be judged negatively by their peers.
And just like during my battle with the spider where I thought I was fearing the spider, I was actually fearing the outcome. I was fearing that he would attack me - crawling on me with his furry little legs. I mean, who wants a spider to crawl on them? It's gross right?
Nope, it's just an overreaction caused by my fear. My irrational, stupid, and completely useless sense of fear.
It is time to remove fear from our lives and start being positive again. It is time to think, act, and be in the present moment.