The Perfect Condtions
B-SIDES
Part of an ongoing B-Sides Collection series, where I’m resurrecting and reviving old things I’ve tucked in my journals, but have never shared, until now. Each piece I write feels like a person to me; a character with a story, personality, and a personal history. This guy below – he’s a doozy, at least to me.
He wrapped around my leg like the cunning snake, and bit me where it really hurt.
I didn’t really have a choice but to pay attention. This is also a really good precursor to my post that will go live this Monday, ‘I Did a Thing’, and the perfect tie together for finally releasing my first book, after 5 long years of…well, everything that’s in the post below.
It’ll make sense when you read the next piece, on Monday.
Written sometime in February, 2019, on a private writing retreat in a tiny cottage in Washago, Ontario.
I spend/waste a lot of time not doing things because it’s just not quite the perfect conditions.
Responding to work emails. Yard work. Laundry.
Getting sober.
Writing ‘the book’.
It’s our tendency to criticize and compare – people, things, events, music, food, circumstances. It’s rare that we ever accept something simply as is. We are constantly judging and diminishing what actually is and imagining any number of alternate realties – other than this one.
We call it waiting, when in fact, it’s avoiding.
By waiting until Monday, until you’re more rested, until you have less going on, until you get home, until you have more money, more time, more patience, less fat, less stress, less to do or less to worry about – we put off whatever discomforts we hold aversions to and will do anything to avoid.
Anything that isn’t just how we like it.
Anything that makes us feel uncomfortable.
I put off even trying to get sober for decades, with as many excuses as days that passed while I just sat there on the sidelines, avoiding feeling all the feels of what I knew I had to go through.
Here’s the thing.
The conditions will never be perfect.
It’s our job to make it work anyways, and it’s our job to do the work.
The time is going to pass regardless, so you may as well just start now.
I wish I had given myself that advice 20 years ago.
Or honestly just listened to it when others gave it to me over and over and over again over the years. As they say, the best time to plant a tree is ten years ago, and the next best time is now.
I still find myself constantly trying to curate the perfect conditions for everything from writing to maintaining my sobriety. When I opted to stop saying that I was a writer (who wasn’t doing any actual writing) until I made the commitment to start writing more regularly, the first thing I found myself doing was shopping for desks, and chairs, and lamps, and candles. I caught myself spending an entire day sourcing furniture and building the Mecca of Writing Nooks, complete with a freshly downloaded screensaver of casually swimming koi for my computer that was just sitting there waiting to be used.
If I’d just spent that day writing instead, I’d have more to show and be proud of than just a pretty desk and blank white screen with its flashing cursor taunting me.
The exact same thing happened (I say happened, as though it wasn’t my own doing) while I was getting ready to come to this cottage to write.
I spent/wasted two days fussing over what to bring, preparing food, packing and repacking, making lists and shopping for things I’ve yet to even unpack and know I’m not even going to use.
Two days of expertly avoiding the reality that all I really needed to do was write.
And since my deeply rooted fear of failure (and success) was stirring at the prospect of having to buckle down and actually write if I wanted to call myself a writer, it stepped right up to help distract me and avoid those painful, uncomfortable feelings of doing what scares me.
Getting sober was no different.
I’d wait to maybe try and quit drinking (or smoking, or eating properly, or spending less, or going to the gym – you do you to make all of this blog uniquely yours – the lessons are the same no matter where you come from) until after this weekend, because company was coming. I’d wait to maybe try and quit drinking until tomorrow, because I’d already been drinking for 5 hours and it was only 4pm, so rather than stop nowI may as well just wait and start tomorrow, instead.
Truth is, I was just scared shitless of the unknown.
I would rather carry the burden of not even having started instead of facing the inevitable and having to deal with it.
Of having to maybe be uncomfortable.
Of having to feel my way through it alone in the dark.
Of admitting I didn’t know it all and I didn’t – or would ever – have it all together.
The Perfect Conditions I used as roadblocks and interruptions only ended up detouring and delaying me, making the first steps infinitely harder and heavier for all the added weight I was now carrying, heavy with guilt and self-disgust.
I’d get caught in the loop of wanting to move forward, riding my automatic reactions of avoiding and delaying, beating myself up for not having quit yet, feeling even more feelings of guilt and remorse, then running to the nearest bottle as quickly as possible to make those uncomfortable feelings known as reality go away as fast as I could.
The Perfect Conditions I was using to avoid the work I needed to do were just chameleons, transforming to look like necessary and natural parts of the whole picture. The only conditions they were perfect for, however, were adding to my already heavy heart, adding one more reason to degrade myself for stalling.
For delaying.
For avoiding.
Like always.
That’s what the egoic voice inside all of us does.
It ridicules. It keeps us down and tethered to false truths about who we are (or who ‘it’ wants us to be - you know the ‘it’ - that hurt little kid inside, the abused spouse, the self-harmer, the anxious and insecure – we all have our it).
It sets us up to stay distracted in a desperate attempt to protect us from those feelings of discomfort and being out of our comfort zones, because that’s it’s job.
Its job is to ensure we stay out of danger.
Feelings of uncertainty, pain, discomfort, and disorientation are dangerous to our well-being, as far as the voice in our head is concerned.
So naturally, even the idea of getting rid of alcohol raised all the alarms inside me.
It sent all of its troops to the frontline to build walls and dig trenches, to do anything and everything they could to deter me from crossing over into uncharted, and scary, territory.
We are all much smarter than we care to admit.
We know when we’re doing this.
We know when we’re in avoidance mode, tossing jokes about procrastination around like it’s a schoolyard game of dodgeball.
Except, eventually, the ball hits you smack in the face and forces you to pay attention.
It knocks you on your ass.
It knocked me on my ass.
It was almost as though my habit of aversion had a wicked sense of humour, and instead of delivering the elusive Perfect Conditions I was choosing to wait for, It brought to me the ultimate Worst Conditions, instead.
“Midlife: When the universe grabs your shouldERS and tells you
‘I’m not f-ing around, use the gifts you were given.”
– Brené Brown
The Universe doesn’t have all day to play your games.
It may entertain you for a while, and it may even play along. But eventually, a time comes along when the stakes are higher, and the game gets harder, and we aren’t just playing anymore. What you’re up against becomes the real deal.
It becomes a life-or-death situation, now swollen and bloated (and probably broke and surrounded by a lot of the really wrong people, since all the good ones left a long time ago) after all the time it’s been sitting there festering, just waiting for you to get started.
So, what are you actually waiting for?
Photo banner ©Flora Borsi.
A dude who thinks, bakes, writes, learns, and teaches. And I make a LOT of sourdough.
Shawn Van Daele / SJ Van Dee
