A while back, I was reading to pass the time waiting for a phone call I was expecting. I picked up Margaret Guenther’s book, The Practice of Prayer and thumbed through it. In her chapter on finding God the in the everyday, she describes the “noonday devil” or the spirit of acedia. Acedia is apathy, the draining away of inspiration, a deadening of the soul. In my mind, acedia is another name for resistance and block.
Here’s how Robert Boice in his landmark book, How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency, describes the symptoms of block: loss of enjoyment, waning self confidence, fatigue, distaste for the process, anxiety, and ambivalence–the yearning to act coupled with resistance against acting. He says that blocked people become “disaffected,” meaning that they perceive their ideas as stale or no longer interesting.
What the noonday devil does, Guenther writes, is to woo us away. Woo us away from our callings, our divinely inspired vocations. Here’s what she says, “…the noonday devil …insinuates [itself] into our thoughts, suggesting that God is not very interested in us and that consequently what we do is not important. [It] can persuade us that…we might as well let go of dreams and hopes.” The noonday devil encourages us to envy, to compare ourselves to others and find ourselves lacking. But most insidiously, the noonday devil invites us to quench our own spark.
As Mephistopheles boasts in Faust, “I am the spirit of eternal negation,” the noonday devil points to acedia and softly whispers ‘no.’ Or in my case, often whispers ‘Look, over here! Email!” It is so tempting to do the easy (check for mail) that yields a mirage of results (emails received) rather than the seemingly difficult but actually quite easy (sitting down and reviewing what I did last, and relaxing into my work) that yields results.
The mantra of GTD, “what is the next action?” is a powerful weapon against the noonday devil. Taking action, no matter how small, propels you forward, keeps you engaged, and anchors you in the present moment. And moment by moment, step by step, you move out of the shadows where this teensy demon torments into the sunshine where your dreams are waiting.
Awesome post Tara! Resistance is definitely the enemy and the enemy is resistance!