It’s a corn kernel wedged between the incisor and the front tooth. It’s a rattling mug somewhere on the shelf whenever a vehicle drives by. It’s watching video after video, playing just “one more,” and telling yourself that “tomorrow I’ll get serious about it.” You resort to threats if you don’t produce, if you don’t progress. “Don’t watch one minute of television until you do this thing that you supposedly ‘love.'” That won’t work. So you butter yourself up with incentives. “Work for 15 minutes and then play a game.” But you go for the reward first, and rationalize you need to get it out of your system.

At times, a creative endeavor is simply an affectation. The human brain craves the path of least resistance. The satisfaction of a job well done? Finding truth through the journey, not the destination? To quote Veruca Salt, “I don’t care, I want it now.”

It’s akin to breaking through a concrete wall with a toothpick thinking you have the right tool. The work somehow satisfies the creative spirit, the higher calling, the muse. From the outside, you’re just a quixotic wacko.

And when you are a little more forgiving of yourself, and when you are little more patient, and when you’re doing anything other than the thing you are supposed to do it, that nagging reminder emerges and taps you on your shoulder. Kind of like your mother telling you to call a family member “Happy Birthday,” and you don’t really want to do it, but you know that it would make their day, but you know it really doesn’t matter in the overall trajectory of your life.

That’s the rub: to create meaning to use as energy to produce, knowing it is entirely self-imposed. The metric for success is self-determined. I won’t know it’s done, until I feel it’s done.

Two competing forces: wanting it to be over with and wanting it to be done the right way. It’s a tug-o-war over time.