STRUGGLING WITH STRUGGLE
At long last my publisher has informed me that my fifty year investigation of the nature and use of meaningful coincidences has actually been shipped from the printer yesterday. My friends and family are all excited. "You must be thrilled to death, what a fantastic accomplishment, I can imagine how you must be feeling." Of course this is how I would and have felt when someone I have know has or would tell me about a book they have recently published. However - the actuality of my current feelings is remarkably neutral. I think the reason for my unexpected 'flatness' is due to a significant shift in my attitude towards my own creative process.
Creative process - what am I talking about?
I literally began recording what I considered to be 19 meaningful coincidences (synchronicities) in my journal when I was 19 years old. That was fifty years ago. During this time my initial amazement shifted to curiosity shifting yet again to scientifically investigating the multiple perplexities of these quite remarkable and uncanny occurrences .
After
twenty years I had enough material researched enabling me to write a
paper on this subject which I sent to The International Journal of
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for their consideration in publishing it.
Much to my surprise I received a highly pointed and detailed critique of my efforts on November 19, 1979. The date is significant to me as you can see it is thirty one years ago.
The critique
began: Dear Dr. Williams - The Editorial Board of the IJPP has reviewed
your paper, "The Psychodynamics of Meaningful Coincidences." I am sorry
to inform you that our readers were not able to recommend acceptance of
this paper for publication in the Journal. They did, however, indicate
considerable interest in your subject, and made a number of
recommendations for revision. They indicated too that they would be glad
to reconsider the paper if you found our recommendations helpful and
undertook the necessary reworking. "
My reaction was shock. I took no action on the critique except to continue researching these scientific anomalies. In fact I misplaced the letter re-discovering it thirty years later. In assessing the reasons for my shock I have concluded that I was frozen with panic anxiety. The first threat to my self was a perceived sense of failure. The second and infinitely more significant fear was an extreme aversive reaction to potential success.
During the next decade of the 80s I faced up to these paralyzing fears session by session in my 11 year psychoanalysis three sessions per week. On numerous occasions I revealed my profound longing to be able to write a book on this subject but either couldn't begin or didn't feel adequate enough to take the necessary steps to complete it.
My wise analyst assured me that as I worked through my various blocks, stuck points, resistances, clarified my thinking, knew that I had something original to say and could finally take myself seriously having forged a self that I could take seriously, I would most likely know when the time was right and step by step author the book on coincidences.
I learned something that is obvious to me now but at the time seemed elusive about my creative process. A book like any desired objective such as a published book first begins with a desire to make an abstract idea into a concrete object.
The gap between starting and completion is like like a marker used to measure the progress over time of a campaign to raise a certain specified amount of money. One begins the campaign at zero and incrementally fills in the space until the 100 percent goal is reached.
This is obvious. What was not obvious to me at the time was the fact that each increment of progress was experienced as both triumphant mastery quickly and inevitably followed by surprising and unexpected dreaded feelings of tension and high anxiety.
At such moments a thousand ways to divert my attention with the express purpose of getting away form the unpleasant feelings would automatically set in. Despite my insistence that I should not be experiencing these 'negative resistances" they would occur irrespective of my list of what was and was not supposed to be along with associated judgments.
It was only when I shifted my attitude from dread of unwanted tension and anxiety with each new task on my current to do list from aversion to acceptance that I began to significantly close the gap between being preoccupied with the fantasy of a published book to doing the disciplined day to day activity eventuating in t he concrete finished manuscript sent to the publisher.
I also experienced the gradual ascent towards mastery of the process as not only incremental but also as uneven. Moving up and onwards more often than not was experienced by me as trench warfare - 14 trenches ahead and 6 back - contrasted with my initial expectation that once I put my mind to it I would - as The Secret appears to promise - that I would ride my creative process like a knife cutting through butter.
Illuminations were followed by ditch digging - inspiration mixed with slow, plodding, scut work. The whole process for me is like planting a seed, surrounding it with conditions favorable for maximum growth and development, initiating a root system, nurturing its development, resulting eventually in the unfolding of its nature as a tree, or flower or whatever.
This brings me to the here and now. My publisher said the book is in the mail. That sounds nice. But the truth is I will believe it when I see and touch it. Until then no celebration. However last night I had a dream that seemed to run the whole night. I think I was holding a copy of my book and looking and re-looking over the table of contents. I also think I was feeling in between a mixture of disbelief and and pure unqualified joy.
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