When the Passion Doesn’t Meet the Gumption

So earlier in the week I was sitting with a friend and the subject of what someone should do when they feel the need to create but they just don’t feel the get-up-and-go to make it happen came up.

When you love something so much you can find yourself indulging in it for a period of time. It could be a few days or a few months, but you obsessively dive into it. You write every day, you sit at your sewing machine and stitch, or maybe you bake anything and everything you can find. And then suddenly you wake up one morning and even though you still love your indulgence you somehow just can’t seem to make yourself do it. She had reached that point and I know I’ve been there myself.

So the question arose, how does one fix the issue where the spirit is willing but the body is rather “meh” about the whole idea? I’ve found that there are two ways to tackle this. You can just rest for a bit. Acknowledge you’re still passionate about it but that you need to take a break. Not every passion needs to be indulged constantly. Recharge the batteries and revisit it again for however long it takes. Or you can try and just sit down and try it. It’s a little like when you feel like you want to go out and do something fun but you can’t seem to make yourself get up off the couch and leave. You just needed to make yourself do it and you found yourself having fun after all. Sometimes a wall just goes up that you need to break through so that you can keep following that passion instead of risking its stagnation.

Have you ever reached that point? How did you handle it?