Contract

So, today, I'm at that point Robin* wrote of.
I had another crazy early hours of Sunday morning a-cross-country-bolting homewards from the city.
Now, mid-afternoon and my sleep caught up, lying naked-for-the-unusual-heat pressing down on the house, I'm there.
There where he said.
All the blinds, and curtains, are shut against the heat, so as to cool the airflow through my home.
I'm alone. Completely. In my weekend craziness I've done everything I can to severe ties, many in fact. And good ones too, some of very best; and some of the worst. But severed they are, for better or for worse.
This is a good sign: Pressfield in The War of Art writes that Resistance is its most awfully powerful when the prize is the greatest, and attainable. I suppose it's the equivalent of the darkest hour being just before dawn.
Judging by the (unusual) wind howling from the west and over the edge of the escarpment, a storm must be coming.
"The only way to lift your life to the next level...is to assume real leadership over your life."
"The moment you look in the mirror and say to yourself, from the deepest place within you, 'For my life to change, I must change' - that's the moment you'll grow up and walk through a doorway that will lead you to your best life."*
So I have picked up my tattered, battered The Artist's Way after exactly a decade, and commit myself again, from today, to it's process.
I also commit to no alcohol for the 12-week period. As much as I enjoy it, it takes me nowhere that's good. And beneath it's benign dictatorship I relinquish all responsibility, exactly as the structure of this sentence underscores.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow's* words scratch my ear drums and chalk squeakingly across the flip-chart of my mind:
"We fear our highest possibilities.... We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under times of great courage. We enjoy and even thrill in the possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments and yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities."
Steffen, yesterday, with big green eyes liquidly welling over, had the courage - over carrot cake and a short-te-mocha at Seattle - to hold up the mirror.
I didn't like what I saw.
Thank you.
I pray for wisdom and understanding. Also for courage and inner strength.
And for much, much less, even none, pride and arrogance.
And for a simple, streamlined - but good - life.