When Murphy’s Law Meets Resistance

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Have you ever expe­ri­enced a time when you were try­ing to man­i­fest a sig­nif­i­cant change or trans­for­ma­tion in your life and every­thing that could go wrong did go wrong? Add to this a nasty lit­tle imp called ‘Resis­tance’ and you end up with a frus­trat­ing sit­u­a­tion where Murphy’s Law meets the War of Art!!

This is what my life has been life for the past cou­ple of weeks.

For those who are unfa­mil­iar with Murphy’s Law or The War of Art — let me explain:

Murphy’s Law states that any­thing that can go wrong will go wrong at the worst pos­si­ble moment. It’s like when your USB mem­ory stick devel­ops amne­sia right after you have fin­ished writ­ing three of the best blog posts ever in the his­tory of blog posts!! Which, once you have picked your­self up off the floor after hav­ing col­lapsed to the ground in a quiv­er­ing, whim­per­ing heap, leaves you scram­bling,  try­ing to remem­ber those per­fect ideas expressed in those per­fect words and sen­tences. Yeah — not so easy to do!!

Or — just after you learn that you are prob­a­bly going to need to have a new fur­nace put into your 100 year old house and have the slightly crum­bling chim­ney relined to the tune of mul­ti­ple thou­sands of dol­lars, one of the drains in your house (the one that takes the used water from your kitchen includ­ing the dish­washer and wash­ing machine) breaks, leav­ing you with­out the use of your dish­washer and wash­ing machine — the day before you have planned a fam­ily brunch!!!

And this is where The War of Art kicks in. With bills and frus­tra­tions increas­ing, and money becom­ing ever more scarce, resis­tance begins tak­ing over vital sys­tems in your brain. Cre­ativ­ity spins from writ­ing to look­ing for a full time job. Thoughts of entre­pre­neur­ship morph into night­mares of punch­ing the 9–5 clock.

But in the mid­dle of all of this, a funny thing hap­pened while I was straight­en­ing up some books. The book, The War of Art, fell out of a book­case. I thought I had lost the book sev­eral months ago, but here it was. Loaded with the exact infor­ma­tion I needed at exactly this spe­cific point in time. Don’t you love ot when that happens!!

Pick­ing the book up, I began read­ing a chap­ter titled “The Unlived Life”: “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resis­tance.” Resis­tance can come in the form of tech­ni­cal mishaps, unex­pected expenses, bills, frus­tra­tions, lack of confidence.….

The War of Art chal­lenges resis­tance. Its funny, inspi­ra­tional, and most impor­tantly moti­va­tional — great for any­one try­ing to over­come resis­tance, to move for­ward with their life — to change, to trans­form, to live the unlived life within us. It was just what I needed to read in order to get myself back on track.

So, how do you cope with resis­tance, pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and the other lit­tle imps that life likes to throw in your way while you are busy try­ing to build your authen­tic life?

TTFN

The War of Art: Break­ing Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Cre­ative Bat­tles is writ­ten by Stephen Pressfield.

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