The other morning I got out of bed, did my morning writing, worked out, sorted the usual eight loads of weekly laundry and carried a huge hamper full of dark clothes down the stairs.
Except when I got near the end of the stairs I stopped paying attention and tripped down the last three.
I saw it happening but could do nothing to stop it. I landed so hard I got a hairline fracture on the top of my foot.
So the whole morning was hijacked, because I spent time with a doctor and time with a boot and then I got home to put kids down for naps after hobbling around trying to put together a lunch for them.
When I was finally ready to sit down, my foot was already throbbing, and laundry was still calling (because my husband tried to do it and just isn’t as good at it as I am), and how in the world could I create something lovely and eloquent and useful when all I could think about was how I wish I had paid better attention so I wouldn’t have tripped down the stairs and broken my foot.
The pain and the accident and the responsibilities left undone because of them stood like giant concrete walls I had to climb before I could focus on creating anything of value.
Sometimes artists have days like this.
Sometimes the kids get sick, and we worry about them and they just want to be near us and creativity flies right out the window every time they cough in their sleep or try their hardest to make it to the bathroom and inevitably fail so it’s all over the carpet instead.
Sometimes the doorbell will ring when we’re right in the middle of flow, right in the middle of writing a word, because the lawn team mowing our neighbor’s yard noticed you might need help with ours.
Sometimes we will trip on our way down the stairs or smash our finger in the car door or cut our hand trying to slice an apple.
Distractions will come in the life of artists—because we are living life (and if we aren’t, our art suffers anyway).
We can’t avoid the distractions, so we must learn to overcome them.
The thing is, we can be made better artists on the hard-to-create days.
If we create anyway.
Because do you know what distraction learns in our creating anyway? It learns that it has no real power over what we decide to do, no real power over us.
What distraction wants is for us to give in. Stop creating. Put it off until tomorrow, or the next day or the one after tha tone.
We can’t. We won’t.
We will create anyway.
Even if we can feel our heartbeat in our foot, we will create. Even if the doorbell rings, we will create. Even if the baby didn’t sleep last night, we will create.
What we create in the face of distraction may not be our best work or even close to it, but it is still practice. It is still valuable.
Distraction still doesn’t win the day.
So that day, even though my foot throbbed and my brain felt foggy and my words didn’t want to come out from hiding, I wrote.
I threw everything out, started over from the beginning all the days after, but I still made something out of nothing.
Distraction did not win.
Challenge: Think of your most common distraction. Write a letter to it. Be serious or funny, but most of all be honest. Tell it you will create anyway—and then do it.
