In Praise of the Pickaxe, Pt. 2

My dear reader, here we are again. Me, sitting here at my computer. You, wherever you may be.  Thank you for being here, even though I have little idea what I want to say to you tonight, not unlike most nights, in all honesty.

I asked myself this question earlier this evening: “Is it wrong that I’m not scared out of my wits to do this journalism-meets essay-meets creative non-fiction that I’ve been commissioned to do in my new role? My ‘big break’?”

I wrote about the concept a few weeks back, after reading Steven Pressfield’s weekly blog, that if you aren’t terrified, petrified to write what you know you need to write, then you aren’t really facing down the largeness that is “your calling.”

I don’t know whether Pressfield would offer any addendums to this theory, but I want to double down on one which came to me last month.

If you have been training like a samurai, day in and day out, knife’s edge-focused, totally committed; and if you have seen the other side of the coin—what life might look like if you don’t answer your calling, and it scared the ever-loving sh•t out of you—then nothing can stop you from doing what you know you came here to do.

There comes a moment, in fact, when not doing the work, not answering the call, or not meeting yourself at your weakest points, your roughest parts so that you may grow into the version of you who has the capacity to do these large things, is actually much more terrifying than doing the job in question. 

The thing is, when you’re working at your calling, you’re actually not really doing it for anyone else. Of course, I’d love the work I do to enliven people and to inspire them to reestablish contact with their own internal passions and spiritual terrain, but it’s not why I do it. I do it for me and for God, because He put the words in me to share in with you.

So even though I admit to feeling a healthy amount of dread when I think about ALL of the writing this new project will require of me, I have absolute certainty that at the end of it all, if I do it for me and for the Creator, and if I push myself past laziness and past the fear that can crop up during the writing process (“You suck,” says that little voice), and above all, if I just keep showing up, the rest will take care of itself.

Have a great Tuesday.