They couldn’t stand the discomfort that arose from being forced to acknowledge their limited control over the speed of the creative process—and so they sought to escape it, either by not getting down to work at all, or by rushing headlong into stressful all-day writing binges, which led to procrastination later on, because it made them learn to hate the whole endeavor.

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing.

If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write.

Perhaps the most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once; that way, you get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts—because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead. You get to preserve your sense of being in control of things, but at the cost of never finishing anything important.

It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop or flow, to concentrate alternately on parallel channels. Is this enough to say you would like to live several lives simultaneously? Or that you actually do live them? That you separate your life with one person or in one environment from your life with others, elsewhere? That in every experience you take for granted a dissatisfaction that can be redeemed only in the sum of all dissatisfactions?

At any moment there exist in the fringes of my thought faint patternings which can be brought to distinctness when I look at them. Like a policeman with a flash-light I can throw the bright circle of my awareness where I choose; if any shadow or movement in the dim outer circle of its rays arouses my suspicion, I can make it come into the circle of brightness and show itself for what it is. But the beam of my attention is not of fixed width, I can widen or narrow its focus as I choose. To explore the sky for aircraft a searchlight must travel backwards and forwards, sweeping the sky like a broom. My thought can do that, but it has another movement as well; it can widen its beam and survey the whole sky at the same moment, and this widening is something which I can control at will.

I could easily make lists of whatever came into my head but could not decide between them because in one mood one would be important, in a different mood another; I had never followed any one of them whole-heartedly. I had thought I wanted a great many friends, but had often refused invitations because I hated to feel the beautiful free space of an empty day, free for me to do what I liked in, broken into by social obligations. I had thought I wanted to be a unique individual, but had been filled with shame when anyone disagreed with me, hastening to take back what I had said. I had thought I wanted to be importantly useful in the world, but avoided all opportunities for responsibility. I had thought I wanted to plumb human experience to the depths, and yet had striven to remain immaculately aloof from all emotional disturbance.

My life and my self doesn’t feel like anything like a unified developed character in a linear narrative to me. I may be mentally ill, maybe you’re not. But my guess is, looking at things like MTV videos or new fashions in ads, with more and more flash cuts, or the use of computer metaphors which would only be useful metaphors if the ability to do triage and tree-diagrams resonated with people’s own existence in life. That I think a lot of people feel—not overwhelmed by the amount of stuff they have to do. But overwhelmed by the number of choices they have, and by the number of discrete, different things that come at them. And the number of small … that since they’re part of numerous systems, the number of small insistent tugs on them, from a number of different systems and directions. Whether that’s qualitatively different than the way life was for let’s say our parents or our grandparents, I’m not sure. But I sorta think so. At least in some—in terms of the way it feels on your nerve endings.

I discovered that I was drifting without rudder or compass, swept in all directions by influence from custom, tradition, fashion, swayed by standards uncritically accepted from my friends, my family, my countrymen, my ancestors. Were these reliable guides for one's life? I could not assume that they were, for everywhere around me I saw old ways of doing things breaking down and proving inadequate. Not only was it that I felt dubious about trusting the dictates of a social tradition which had landed us in the war, but the voice of that tradition was so confused that I did not in fact know what it was telling me to do, what sort of life it did require of me.

We then experience a predictable sense of excitement when we get close to something we want, and a predictable feeling of disdain when we feel a situation we want nothing to do with coming on. Caught in fantasies which support our preferred identities, we also shut off a good portion of our actual experience. A good portion of our lives, (let’s say 90%, just to be dramatic), don’t register at all. And then we feel cut-off from life as if we are living behind a pane of glass.

But if expectancy of delight was a stumbling-block, so that vivid pictures of what might happen shut me off from perceiving what actually did happen, an even greater impediment was expectancy of failure. For here the ingrained habit of a lifetime seemed invariably towards contraction. As soon as the fear of making a mistake rose in my mind, then the act of wide attention became almost impossible. For the more I realized the difficulty, the more I tried and focused my attention to a pin-point, like an internal screwing-up of one's eyes to see better.