faded moments, the ones that got away…

Creative people find it hard to do the thing that in the abstract sounds relatively easy to do: create & keep creating. What is at the core of the problem?

Picture an egg . If you want to crack an egg because you are baking a cake, you whack it on the side of your bowl, it breaks, & you drop it into the bowl. There’s nothing simpler. But if you are not baking a cake, an egg’s shell feels remarkably formidable. There is something scary about cracking an egg for no good reason, something that makes us squeamish, something that feels like a violation of the egg. Trying to crack an egg for no good reason elicits the same sort of feeling that chalk scratching on a blackboard does. It is a physical reaction, rooted in some primitive fear or anxiety.

Creating each day requires that we crack thorugh a shell of resistance, a shell that frightens us to crack…except when we are really working on something. Then it doesn’t scare us at all & we experience no negativity.

What exactly is this resistance that needs cracking each day? It arises both

from the primitive part of our being, where we fear shadows, & from the sophisticated part of our being, where we understand too much about difficulty & failure…

When the appointed time arrives to create, get out an egg & a bowl, crack the egg, drop it….then begin working. The practice of cracking an egg grabs your mind’s attention & pulls it away from its customary harangue about whether or not you really mean to work. There’s no story attached to it. You begin to see how absurd it is not to break through……..Eric Maisel