Nah, man. I love having a monumental task looming over me, uncompleted, just staring at me like a specter waiting for its turn to exist in the world. It can’t be left undone, of course. If I knew I’d never do it then its stare would have no power. The whole reason its gaze looks into my soul is because it compels me to act even while it terrifies me.
I don’t think I need to convince myself that the fear is unjustified or irrational. Maybe the fear is justified, maybe it’s completely rational. That doesn’t really matter, though. Fear is not an excuse. Pants-shitting terror is not a reason you cannot do something.
Pray at this altar every day: the shrine that is the keyboard and monitor. Each key corresponding to a symbol that represents a word, carved by ancient peoples into stone, pressed into clay, scrawled on papyrus — I now have them at my fingertips, created on command, in the sequence in which I hit them. This method will soon be antiquated, but I need it because it’s what my neural net was trained on and thus how I enter my flow state. That is the purpose of this exercise, of all writing exercises: to get yourself closer to the flow state, to make the flow state more easily accessible.
What is the flow state? That would be a good topic. The diagram says it’s where discipline meets surrender. Before you know what you’re even surrendering to, you have to have the discipline to get to the point that you’re confronted by something scary. I don’t know what’s going to make you scared, maybe an idea that seems too stupid to work or too ambitious to be possible. But then you have to surrender and just do it. The muse provides the concept, you have to actualize it and see it through. Narrow down your mind, let the other things fall away, focus on what you can see clearly and what you can bring into existence in this particular pocket of matter.