Every so often of late I find myself marveling at how when I dare to really form a question around an issue that has been on my mind, every so often, the exact answer I am looking for will be bounced back at me. The Secret would define that as the “Law of Attraction” and The Artist’s Way would call it “Synchronicity”.

I just call it “very handy”.

The question I find myself asking more and more often is how is it I can have such a love of animation, but such a fear of its pursuit?

Today’s answer came in the form of a video that someone on Facebook actually sent to me a few days ago, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to sit down a watch until today. The video is Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity which I have included at the end of this post as well.

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When I first started this blog I was on vacation, so finding time for daily updates and daily romps through my various favourite creative playgrounds was easy. But I returned to my job on Monday and thus the slow down in activity both on the blog and everywhere else.

This, of course, is the crux of the dilemma. You want to do all this stuff, but after an eight hour work day what you end up doing is crashing on the couch in front of the TV. Some days I think that’s just the reality of your work day. I wonder at times exactly the sort of world we live in when we are required to consume some variety of stimulant throughout the day–aka caffeine in the form of coffee or pop–just to make it to quitting time without falling asleep on our keyboard.

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Is there something in your life that you’ve always wanted to do, but can’t seem to get around to it? Maybe take up piano lessons? Start that diet? Finish that novel? Volunteer for a great cause? And yet somehow, despite all your best intentions, you wind up on the couch watching re-runs of Grey’s Anatomy and wondering if Patrick Demsey’s star-power is perhaps bottled in with his hair conditioner.

This ongoing battle with ourselves to get our butts off the couch and doing the things that we say we want to do is what Steven Pressfield defines as The War of Art. According to his book, our desire to do creative works or change our lives for the better is all too often met with an insidious enemy which he calls ‘Resistance’. Using the war metaphor, Pressfield personifies this enemy and chronicles Resistance’s various guises such as procrastination, excuses, fear, self-doubt, self-criticism, addictions and so on. Every possible self-sabotaging element that we could possibly come up with to throw in our own path is another face of Resistance. And, for an aspiring artist/writer/entrepreneur/musician/whatever, Resistance is public enemy #1.

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