I am the flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.

I quit smoking a year ago. It was one of the hardest things I ever did, maybe the hardest. It was also one of the best things I ever did, because I realized that if I could accomplish that, many other things would be a cake walk in comparison. Not long after that, I dedicated myself to a daily yoga practice, and I haven’t missed a day in about eleven months. The yoga led me to conquer problems with sleep and eating habits I’d had since childhood. Now I’ve got a regular routine of going to bed early and getting up early to do yoga and meditate and pray. I’m no longer influenced by whatever unhealthy stuff my flatmate buys at the supermarket, whereas before I’d always been unable to resist whatever made it into the refrigerator. Last September I decided to always eat dinner at a reasonable time, always before 6pm, and not at 8 or 9 or 10 or 11 o’clock as my flatmate does, and not to compromise with him on it. A few months ago, I went from eating Wurst and salami almost every day to not eating any meat which had been processed or of which I suspected the animal had been under stress. In October I decided to exercise every day, besides doing yoga: Mondays and Thursdays I exercise my back, biceps and forearms; Tuesdays and Thursdays I work my chest, shoulders, and triceps; Wednesdays and Saturdays I do my abs and my legs; Sundays I jog. I have not broken this routine even once since I started. I recently decided that I had to do something about my dependency on coffee and so I abstained for 40 days, and now I hardly drink it.

This list of good habits amazes me... and probably annoys the heck out of you. My point is that most of my actions are congruent with my will nowadays. Now that I’ve found the maturity and the will power, I can do the things I always wanted to do. This would not have been even remotely possible for me a year and a half ago. But since I proved to myself I could conquer severe THC and nicotine addictions, I’ve found will power that I didn’t even know I had. In so many ways I’m becoming the person I’ve always wanted to be.

So why, oh why, oh why can I not do my work?

I have so much to do. My publisher would love for me to churn out book after book. Each one I get offered is bigger than the last. I’ve committed to writing three this year. I finally, for the first time in my life, have prospects of a job which I can live from. It’s interesting and really fosters my development. And I can improve the lives of so many teachers and students… if I do it well.

As each project gets bigger and more important than the last ones, and I’m forced to stretch the limits of what I can do, I strongly suspect that it’s fear of not doing well that makes me procrastinate like this. The only project that was a backwards step of sorts—a very easy workbook I wrote last autumn—was the only project I didn’t procrastinate on.

But I don’t want to go through life without challenges, only doing work that’s easy!

This is what I’ve been talking about most of the time with my therapist Robin. I told her about my complex relationship to work, how my procrastination began in the years when I hated school, how I’ve always had problems in every job I’ve ever had, how I feel like a child, full of shame and guilt for not being able to simply work a decent job. As she does with all negative emotions, she asked me to get in touch with the feeling that makes me procrastinate, to feel where it is in my body, to describe the quality of the feeling as much as I can. That was really hard to do with this feeling. I couldn’t really invoke it. Even at home, procrastinating, I couldn’t find the feeling that was holding me back. The feelings I had were shame and guilt for not getting to work, the feeling of time running out, and the feelings were strong, but not strong enough to make me work. The feeling that was keeping me from working was hiding.

Finally, in a recent session with Robin, we talked about what the vision of working perfectly would be, and this led to a small breakthrough. I’d been making it a daily practice to imagine myself working diligently, with God’s grace flowing through me and going out to my students and teachers, trying to remember and give thanks for the times when I was working diligently, to try to recreate how that felt. I can’t remember what questions Robin asked me, but in answering them I got the vision of churning out tons of text, not caring how much would actually go into the book (usually I think for a long time before I write and most of it stays in the final version). I saw myself working on paper (which I don’t usually do), drawing mind maps and brainstorming enthusiastically. After I described it, she started describing it in her words and this made me feel really good for a minute; the dream really felt possible. But suddenly—perhaps I tried to remember when the last time was that I worked with such enthusiasm, perhaps I thought about leaving the session and going home to actually try and make the dream reality—I had a sudden, horrible feeling in my chest, like a big pile of clay had suddenly landed there, and a tingling blush in my hands as if I'd just tripped walking up onto a stage to accept an award with my entire high school watching me. We had found the feeling that was making me procrastinate by exploring the opposite feeling, the feeling of working enthusiastically. She asked me what the latter feeling needed in order to dispel the former. I had to think about this for a long time.

I wasn't sure at all, but I said maybe it was the courage to experiment and play without worrying about what others think. Maybe what I need is just the courage to try one more time without worrying about any aspect of the outcome. My career hopes have been dashed so many times that I’m missing the childish qualities that would keep me in an enthusiastic mode. We talked about archetypes which could help me. She liked the Fool. I’m also thinking about the Writer, the Artist, the puer eternis.

I’ve talked about this with some people who are productive and diligent workers: my father, some friends, my flatmate Andreas. It helps to talk about it but nothing has led to real progress.

I’ve listened to lectures, read articles, tried NLP. The improvement is minimal.

In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran wrote:

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.

Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.

But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born.

And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,

And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.

But if you in your pain call birth an affliction and the support of your flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written.

I have that quotation next to my computer. I would so love to be that flute.

Unfortunately this blog entry isn’t a story with a nice, clean, happy ending, as the others have been. I still procrastinate with work. It’s really terrible most of the time. Right now this block is the biggest obstacle on the Way To My Purpose.