The Block

6 July 2020

I: Tension

Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, draws a clear line in the sand between the professional and the amateur:

The amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps.
To the amateur, the game is his avocation. To the pro it’s his vocation.
The amateur plays part time, the professional full time.
The amateur is a weekend warrior. The professional is there seven days a week

By all accounts, I am an amateur artist and writer.

Yet, my amateur mind still feels the pressure to write and produce pieces regularly, which brings an added layer to my character; another title, tied with my identity – or Ego.

I find myself thinking; engaging with experiences through the lens of someone who may later take something from these, to inspire a book, an article, or a post.

Pressfield abides by a simple commandment – that is, do the work – and so, with this in mind, I have sat down at my computer to begin the process by which I allow my fingers to distil the thoughts whirling chaoticlly inside my head.

I have a few things I would like to write about, ideas that I have been chewing on over the last couple of weeks, but every time I make a start, I hit a “Wrong Way, Go Back” sign.

I stare blankly into the blue lights of my computer as an hour passes, willing an idea to come and possess my fingers, where I can type at speeds that match the tone of my thoughts.

This is how it was before. I kind of figured this was my style.

But sooner or later, the initial buzz wears thin, and we find ourselves stuck, wedged between our intentions and the magnitude of the task at hand; our monkey mind drifting to our deficiencies, our insecurities and our failings as an amateur.

This was bound to happen sooner or later. It is an inevitable part of the process. We know this. I know this.

II: Block

I’ve mentioned in a previous post, that I am an experience sharer, not a blogger.

And so, in alignment with this, the experience I am being called to share is exactly the one I am experiencing right now.

The Block.

The Block shuts down your brain, causing it to play monotones over and over, until you slam your laptop shut in discontent and sign off for the night.

The Block is that seemingly impossible hurdle; we run up, stutter, retrace our steps and repeat without ever actually committing to making the jump – a paralysis by analysis.

It is frustration, disappointment and contempt all in the face of a seemingly immovable object.

And yet, The Block, through willpower alone, cannot be conquered. We can continue to bang our heads against a wall, without so much as a crack in the brick work.

The Block is well and truly here and within the last few minutes I have felt all of those things.

In Pressfield speak, The Block is an aspect of Resistance: the powerful force which stops us from engaging with our work; be it an book, a workout, or an assignment.

The way forward?

Do the work.

And so I did.

III: Work

When I stopped thinking about what to write, and just wrote the most immediate experience at the forefront of my mind, I found a flow; an intensity to my typing, a synchronicity to my thoughts.

In this moment, I realised a great irony: the thing we most need to express, the thing that we are trying so desperately to grasp, is the thing that’s right within us, buried under all of our other ideas we think paints us in a far grander light.

The bizarre thing is that we have all felt this in some way or another in our lives.

How many of us have stumbled our way through a conversation, blabbed our way in an interview, or even rambled on about total nonsense rather than admitting that we don’t know.

We think we should know, and that stops us from actually knowing. We falsify, rather than admit our own naiveté.

When we get in our own way, we heap judgement upon the awareness that is actually there, which stops us from being able to fully engage with an experience.

We add a layer of delusion.

So how do we identify this?

We begin the process of peeling back the layers. We explore alternate perceptions. We get intimate with our experience.

Or put simply, we do the work.

IV: Un-Reality

When I first started writing, I had begun to adopt, what I believed was the attitude of a writer: someone who looked at life through the lens of “Oh I can write about this” or “I wonder which phrasing I’ll use to articulate that”.

It’s what Don Miguel Ruiz, in The Four Agreements would describe as ‘The Dream’ – the illusion which we unconsciously (or consciously) live through, muddying the Truth.

This layer of delusion, this un-reality prevented me from actually engaging and letting the experience of the moment dictate what I get to feel and then later express.

The creative process must begin by cultivating experiences – wholesome, goose bump inducing, full frontal experiences. In these moments, we enter into a more perceptive state of reality; a novel dimension of our existence.

Later, when we sit down to do the work, it is our authentic recollection that dictates our creative outbursts, channelled from the reality of presence and the height of our experience. This is not the recollection we so abruptly decided on in that moment.

Are artists really doing the work anyway? As Pressfield offers, are they just taking dictation? An intelligence “independent of our conscious mind and yet in alliance with it, processing our material for us and alongside us”.

How can we be sure the recreation of our experience is coming from us? True, they are our experiences, but does the expression of these in our art also make them ours?

V: Pro?

There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: it’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.
– Steven Pressfield –

Deep into this write up, I now realise, I have actually been doing the work.

By writing about The Block, I have made that crucial first manoeuvre – started.

Does this make me a professional? A ‘real writer’, albeit for this moment?

VI: Repeat

This is all to say, respect The Block.

For The Block is telling you something.

The Block is telling you that your Ego is far too invested in your intended outcome.

The Block is telling you to get out of your way.

The Block is telling you to dig deeper, pierce through the surface and move closer to the core of your reality.

The Block, most importantly, is telling you to do the work.

Respect the Block.

It is inevitable that you will meet it.

And until we acknowledge it, it’ll continue to hold the pipework until we’re constipated to the gills, giving up all together or imploding in a catastrophic mess.

No one wants that. Clean up your mess. Take responsibility for it.

See The Block for what it is.

Then do the work.