278. A Chance To Be

She doesn’t want to acknowledge it, but she knows she must. Her anxiety has returned. The feeling of it is too demanding to be ignored. She knows that if she tries to work in this state, she’ll get nothing done. She’s already at her desk, staring at the screen. She knows she’ll look at it for half an hour or so and then she’ll have to give up. She’ll need to find something to take her mind off her worries.

She knows that her seeking will not be creative or fulfilling and the distraction will consume both time and energy. She doesn’t want this for herself, not only because she won’t accomplishing anything, but because she knows she’ll suffer more. She’ll suffer because her desire for progress will go unfulfilled. She wishes she didn’t have this desire but she does.

She thinks about the possibility of forcing herself to work but then she realizes this won’t help. How can she force creativity to happen? Forcing will only make her tighter, more frustrated, more tense. What she really needs is looseness, but she can’t figure out how to get there.

Her desire is pulling her in one direction and her anxiety is sending her in another. Neither is any good. They’re both blocking her from taking action. She needs to get free of them, but how? She thinks she needs to let go. Not just of her desire or her anxiety, but everything. She needs to put everything down and just exist.

She gets up from her desk and goes over to the window. She looks out at the world, at the city below, but all she sees is frantic activity — vehicles and people rushing from one place to the next. This is not what she needs.

She goes over to the couch and she sits down. She stares straight ahead, at nothing in particular. Time passes and she notices she’s looking at the books on the shelf opposite. She’s thinking about them, itemizing the ones she has read and the ones she hasn’t. This is not what she needs.

She closes her eyes. She does nothing but breathe in and out in the safety of her self-imposed darkness. Still, thoughts bubble up inside her. Thoughts about her mother, about her art, about her friends, about what to eat for lunch. She tries to let them go. She needs to be empty of everything.

She needs to be bored. That is the conclusion she has reached. If she can cultivate real boredom, there might be a chance. A chance for what? A chance for freedom, perhaps. A chance for creativity, too. Yes, and also something more. A chance to be.