Into the void

It's been way too long and I have had so many fleeting moments over the past four months where I "intended" to write, to make myself sit down and capture what I considered good thought, careful, practical insight. But the moment passed. I've recently asked myself why I let that happen.

First, I know as well as anyone after all these years of meeting so many interesting people who said time and again: "I'm going to write a book". The equivalent today is even simpler: "I'm going to post something on my blog". But we wait, postpone, excuse; we have so many other useful things to do, practical problems to solve, and ways to entertain ourselves, masquerading as taking care of our overworked and underpaid lives. "I'll write a post when I'm on vacation, when the semester ends, when the weekend comes, when I've graded this last bunch of papers, when the wedding season ends".

But the void always fills up. With something. A new TV series. Marketing for new business. Getting back to the gym on a more regular basis. Visiting with girlfriends. Catching up on reading. Organizing the closet.

I used to think my fear of failure was what kept me from blog posting until I realized that as nobody reads this, what's to worry? Then I saw that my procrastination came from fear of the void. I have nothing to say, even and especially when I have these insights and self messages to get it down into a cohesive set of sentences. But that mirror of voidness is what I face every time I sit down to write material under a deadline. Fifty four times this year I wrote wedding love stories and every single time, I started the work with what felt like an empty tank. Maybe that's a chronic condition, this void, only compounded by having no audience and no deadline. It's all a void, everything I do all day, but the hustle bustle creates an illusion more comfortable than making sense of life with words. God help me if word crafting gets in the way of my public television addiction. Well, I did it: made a date with the void and made it through.

My Executive Angel

We have this lizard brain which warns us of danger, mostly when it isn't real. But it's familiar to me, looking back over various periods of my life that were stagnant, stalled, stiff and otherwise going nowhere. Fear. Straight up deer- in- the- headlights fear is a powerful paralysis; it can become a way of life. You wake up years later and not much has changed.

Sometimes that fear can take on massive proportion. A few years ago, when my husband and I were living in upstate New York, we were selling our house. We had a failed business and nothing really compelling on the horizon, so it was time for the now old cliche: to reinvent ourselves.

After 18 years in one home and a wonderful community of good people, why not just stay put? Why not just find another house, smaller, easier to manage, and be done with it. No. I was restless for big change. Move to Boston. Just pull up stakes and move. Our two adult sons were here and why not? One reason why not was that we had no one else here, no very close friend to give us all the right tips. We certainly had no business contacts, and the only neighborhood we knew was the Copley Square area, hardly an affordable residential neighborhood.

I prayed to God for the courage to take every step, hard as it might be, to manage the move, to trust that I could pull off such a move this late in my life. After all, it was not retirement. I wanted Boston. But God was too far away, too focused on the global trajectory of my life, not to mentions billions of others lives, that I had to find an intermediary. Enter the Executive Angel. She could hear me directly and she always said: Yes you can! When I asked for help from New England strangers, she was there in my ear: "Ask the next question, or Ask the tough question". I listened to her, trusted her advice and took action until I made the move. It was a good move, the right move and just the right step at that time.

Who is the Executive Angel? She's a higher level of myself, a part of me that is capable of more than my lizard brain would ever recognize. This angel is there for everyone. If God is too busy, or interested in more global issues, the Executive Angel is easy to access. She's as ordinary as you are, except for the fact that this angel has the willpower, the humility, the relentless drive that you and I neglect to use most of the time.