How To Be Here. Rob Bell
book—the book that, he informed me, didn’t appear to have a clear point.
I then rearranged the entire thing, moving the start to the end and the end to the beginning.
Which took months.
Months in which it became clear that the book wasn’t really about fire in the wine, it was about something else. I kept using a phrase that I didn’t realize I was repeating until my editor pointed it out. That phrase seemed like it should be the title of the book, so I changed the name of the book. Changing the name then shifted some of the central themes, which meant I had to go back through and rearrange the entire book, moving the quantum physics part to the beginning and organizing the rest of the book around seven central themes.
Which took months.
By the fifth draft, I had lost my way. I couldn’t figure out how to take all that content and make it flow. It was like I had all the notes but no melody. I’d sit there and stare at the computer screen for hours, trying to figure out how to make it flow.
Some days I’d write one new sentence.
One.
Other days I’d write one new sentence, and then, at the end of the day, I’d delete that one sentence.
Many, many mornings—by this point well over a year of mornings—I’d get up and make my kids breakfast and take them to school and then I’d sit down at my desk and go through the book AGAIN, looking for even the slightest bit of help to find a way forward.
And that’s when the head games started. You know about head games—those voices in your head, questioning who you are and what you’re doing. Telling you you’re no good.
This was the sixth book I’d written, so you’d think it wouldn’t have been so hard. But it was. It was the most difficult thing I’d ever made. It didn’t matter that I’d done it before. It didn’t matter that I’d done months and months of outlining and arranging. It didn’t matter that I cared deeply about the content.
The blinking line can be brutal.
Because the blinking line doesn’t just taunt you with all the possibilities that are before you, the potential, all that you sense could exist but isn’t yet because you haven’t created it. The blinking line also asks a question:
Who are you to do this?
And that question can be paralyzing. It can prevent us from overcoming inertia. It can cause crippling doubt and stress. It can keep us stuck on the couch while life passes us by.
To answer the question, Who are you to do this?,
you first have to get out of your head.
I use this phrase out of your head because that’s where it’s easy to get stuck. Somewhere between our hearts and our minds is an internal dialogue, a running commentary on what we think and feel and believe. It’s the voices in your head that speak doubt and insecurity and fear and anxiety. Like a tape that’s jammed on “repeat,” these destructive messages will drain an extraordinary amount of your energies if you aren’t clear and focused and grounded.
To get out of your head, it’s important to embrace several truths about yourself and those around you, beginning with this one:
Who you aren’t isn’t interesting.
You have a list of all the things you aren’t, the things you can’t do, the things you’ve tried that didn’t go well. Regrets, mistakes that haunt you, moments when you crawled home in humiliation. For many of us, this list is the source of a number of head games, usually involving the words,
Not _________ enough.
Not smart enough,
not talented enough,
not disciplined enough,
not educated enough,
not beautiful, thin, popular, or hardworking enough,
you can fill in the __________.
Here is the truth about those messages:
They aren’t interesting.
What you haven’t done,
where you didn’t go to school,
what you haven’t accomplished,
who you don’t know and what you are scared of
simply aren’t interesting.
I’m not very good at math. If I get too many numbers in front of me I start to space out.
See? Not interesting.
If you focus on who you aren’t, and what you don’t have, or where you haven’t been, or skills or talents or tools or resources you’re convinced aren’t yours, precious energy will slip through your fingers that you could use to do something with that blinking line.
In the same way that who you aren’t isn’t interesting when it comes to getting out of your head,
who “they” are isn’t interesting.
We all have our they—friends, neighbors, co-workers, family members, superstars who appear to skate by effortlessly while we slog it out. They are the people we fixate on, constantly holding their lives up to our life, using their apparent ease and success as an excuse to hold back from doing our work and pursuing our path in the world.
Siblings who don’t have to study and still get better grades. Brothers-in-law who make more money without appearing to work very hard. Friends who have kids the same age as ours and yet they never seem stressed or tired and always look great.
There’s a moving moment in one of the accounts of Jesus’s life where he’s reunited with one of his disciples, a man named Peter. (I started out as a preacher, and so these stories are in my blood.) Peter is the disciple who had denied that he even knew Jesus earlier in the story, and you can feel his relief when Jesus forgives him, telling him he has work for Peter to do.
And how does Peter respond to this powerful moment of reconciliation?
He points to one of Jesus’s other disciples and asks, What about him?
All Peter can think about is someone else’s path. He’s with Jesus, having a conversation, and yet his mind is over there, wondering about John.
Peter asks,
What about him?
and Jesus responds,
In the movie Comedian, Jerry Seinfeld runs into a young comedian named Orny Adams backstage at a club where they are both performing and Orny says to him,
“You get to a point where you’re like ‘How much longer can I take it?’”
Jerry is utterly perplexed by Orny’s sentiment, asking, “What—is time running out?”
Orny then begins a litany of complaints and excuses—“I’m getting older … I feel like I’ve sacrificed so much of my