It felt like a mountain spring that wouldn’t stop

For six months since I started posting regularly here, the ideas and words just flowed.

It felt like a mountain spring that wouldn’t stop.

Lessons learned from the hard knocks of my career as a founder, leader, and coach.

The mistakes, the moments of clarity, and yes, a few successes too.

But in the last few days, the well seems to have run dry.

I’ve got a long list of post ideas in the Notes app on my iPhone - all meaningful topics - but every time I sit down to write, nothing happens.

So here I am, writing about the only topic that grabs me today: not being able to write.

Ironic, isn’t it?

And when the words stop, the anxiety starts.

That uncomfortable feeling of what if that’s it?

What if the ideas and words never come back?

But sitting in that anxiety, I think I’ve spotted what’s really going on.

I’ve become addicted to the flow - to the ease, the rhythm, the reassurance that ideas would always arrive.

And now that they haven’t, I’m being reminded of one of the most important lessons of the past two years; through leaving the corporate world, training as a coach, facing cancer, and starting over yet again:

Growth comes from sitting in discomfort.

Creativity lives in uncertainty.

It’s funny how we keep having to relearn the same lessons.

Even writing this, naming the anxiety and reconnecting to that truth, has helped the words start moving again.

Who knows when and if the next post will come.

But that feels strangely liberating.

Maybe that mountain spring hasn’t completely dried up after all.  Maybe it just needed a pause. Or maybe it has…