I have discovered why the book and I are struggling.

I said to my friend Michele the other day that the book was like a fish I had caught and thought was beautiful but I wasn’t willing to clean it and cook it and dress it up with parsley and paprika. It was already caught, and that should be enough. I keep feeling like I know what to write but I’ll do it ” in the future.” When I do write, and I read it over, it doesn’t feel “true.”

I have always thought one of my biggest challenges professionally, the one that keeps making me crazy, is staying interested in what I have done long enough to truly profit from it. I do something a few times and then I’m off to the next thing – a typical project person. I have to rewrite speeches each time I give them. can’t teach the same material more than a handful of times… And yet I’m only interested in complex subjects that need years to develop fully, and time to be marketed and shared with others.

But today, I started to wonder if the heart of the matter is my inability to stay present to how the material is showing up right now. I hate the role of expert because I’m not- I’m mainly interested in talking about what I’m doing right now to help me open to God (using that as a catch-all phrase for showing up for life).

It’s like I’m the wave and the surfer and the person on shore watching.

The way through is staying present to where the material is now.

I have to write it in the now. Be the wave in the now and the surfer in the now and the person on shore in the now.

“Let us polish ourselves to such a thinness that glimmers of light shin through. Polish to exhaustion, that weary of doing, the only thing left is to chuck the whole works. Including ourselves.” Michael Green from One Song: The New Illuminated Rumi