Resistance is Futile - Reprise

Weekly Writing Prompt No. 66

Jun 07, 2024

woman with umbrella and flowers dancing in the rain

Hello lovely people and thank you for a. opening this email and b. joining me for my weekly writing prompt. It is a week late, it should have been published last Friday, but last week had other plans for me and I had an unexpected week off. It was lovely to spend the time doing nothing other than simply being free.

My new book The Music Master finally released, hurrah! It’s available in many of the usual online places and I’d love to know what you think of it (at least I think so!)

For those new to The Writing Shed, the weekly writing prompt is the core of my activity here on Substack. Paid members can find an archive of courses I’ve created and access all past writing prompts, flash fiction, writing hints and tips, and essays in The Index.

So have fun, enjoy your writing, and create heaps.

The original Resistance is Futile post was written way back in 2017. I moved it to Substack from WordPress in 2020. My own resistance to current circumstances and the patchwork of unhelpful thinking around it has been on my mind a lot recently. It occurred to me I might find sharing the original post helpful, rather like taking my own advice!

Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass... It's about learning how to dance in the rain. - Vivian Greene

And here it is …

I’ve been waking early over the last few weeks, a combination of being too hot in bed and a mind full of thoughts have kept me wakeful, excited I admit, but wakeful nevertheless. This morning it seemed the right thing to do to get up instead of fretting and fussing and hoping I’d go back to sleep.

So at 4.30 am here I am at my computer, writing. And it occurred to me that the phrase I was looking for to get started is ‘resistance is futile’. And I write that with a wry smile because it has always been this way, but sometimes I want to stamp my feet and shout ‘NO, it’s got to be this way instead’.

The phrase was first used in Star Trek as a message from the Borg when they encountered another race they were about to assimilate and it would be easy to assume that this has a similar meaning for me. But, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In an earlier post, we are all walking miracles, I talked about things just making sense when I stopped and paid attention to what was going on in my body, instead of riding roughshod over the messages it was sending me.

And it’s this aspect that I’d like to explore a little more this morning.

Over the years I have come to understand that two things drive my behaviour

My thoughts
The circumstance I find myself in

Each of these is independent of the other and neither needs to be driven by the other. Often what happens though is that I believe what my thoughts are telling me about the circumstance. And, it turns out nothing could be further from the truth.

If I go back to this morning and not sleeping, I could have chosen to stay in bed, tossing and turning, creating anxiety for myself because I was unable to sleep and assuming it would impact the day ahead in a negative way. After all, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few days and it’s what the logical mind tells me I should do ‘because the human body needs 8 hours of sleep every night’.

Instead, this morning I finally recognised that resistance was futile and accepting I was awake and ready for the day would be a much better use of the energy that had woken me in the first place. This is not to say I won’t be tired later on, I may be, but I don’t know that will be so. I may find that getting up when prompted means I sleep better tonight – or not! The truth is I never know what will happen from one moment to the next, and I cannot predict the future, much less plan for it. So, it seems easier to just ‘go with it’.

There is a phrase bandied about in spiritual circles that goes something like ‘what you resist persists’, if you haven’t come across it before then it’s worth understanding its deeper meaning. When I resist something I end up putting a lot of mental, and sometimes physical, effort into avoiding what I think might be negative, I almost never resist something I believe will be positive. But the more I think about whatever ‘it’ is the longer it hangs around and the more pain and discomfort I have as I consider my situation from every conceivable angle in an effort to diminish it.

What I forget is that when I focus on something, the more it shows up in different areas of my life. For example, when my ex-husband and I separated, I spent years fretting over the injustice of the separation, and the home and money I had lost. Until the day I realised that the only person this was hurting was me. At that moment I accepted what had happened and my part in how it had all turned out.

Even though I was now in a new loving and happy relationship, I had been trapped in the past. Once I stopped resisting the way my marriage had ended and accepted what had happened I found that things started moving in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. New opportunities popped up and I made new friends, I was enjoying life again. My depression lifted as I found myself in a present moment that was good, better than good, and definitely better than the past I had been living in.

Resistance comes from the past, a past we don’t want to let go of even if it wasn’t that good. Acceptance comes from the present where all possibilities exist and our future is born.

Resistance often comes from an expectation that life should be a particular way. But when you let go of it life usually has a way of showing up that is better in many unanticipated ways because you open the door to opportunity. I’ve found over the years that when I come into a state of acceptance the creative spark in me begins to glow, giving me new ideas, and generating insights. It shows me different ways to tackle the circumstances I find myself in which I had perhaps felt were insurmountable when looking at them through the lens of my past beliefs and assumptions.

Perhaps the greatest lesson is in spotting when resistance is playing a part in my life. And that’s easy, I always know it’s showing up because I get myself embroiled in internal conversations with my other self, rehearsing what I should or would do or say if only the opportunity presented itself.

Now, as soon as I spot what’s going on – and it can sometimes take hours, days or even weeks – I find myself laughing and letting go. Not because I’m forcing that to happen, but simply because that’s just what makes sense because it isn’t real.

The Prompt

This is a quotation prompt from the ever-insightful Eckhart Tolle. If you’ve done one before, you know what to do; for anyone new use the words clockwise from the top to turn them into something new, but with a similar sentiment.

Please share your poetry or prose in the comments below. Remember, you never know where today’s prompt may take you in the future!

Reflect

I include a reflection opportunity with every writing prompt because our writing always wells up from our inner landscape.

I have noticed that resistance shows up most frequently in my writing life. It then has the unnerving habit of spilling over into other areas but the source is always my frustration with the creative process.

Do you notice pockets of resistance in your life? If so what, if anything, do you do about them? How do you use the idea of resistance in your writing?

As a coach, mentor, and counsellor I work with many people on different life paths. Some hope to write a best-selling book, while others want to be healthier and happier. Each person has a unique way of starting the inner work this requires. If you’re a writer who wants to manifest your writing hopes and dreams from the practical and pragmatic to the esoteric and spiritual, or who would like to clear any subconscious self-sabotage you may be experiencing, why not work with me? To find out more head over to my website by clicking the button below.

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Missing in Action

This new section of the weekly newsletter is dedicated to all the words removed from dictionaries over the years. Words that define and describe our world, but which are deemed no longer necessary.

This edition is dedicated to the word Hepatectomize which is no longer included in any Merriam-Webster dictionaries1.

The Weekly Soulshine

Something to listen to …

I defy anyone to listen to Sunshine on Leith and not be moved …

The Weekly Writing Competition

This week’s contest is the Imagine 2200 Climate Fiction Prize for stories between 2,500-5,000 words on environmental themes. The deadline for entries is the 24th of June You can read more about the competition here: https://grist.org/climate-fiction/imagine-2200-contest-submissions/

With love, light, and laughter
Linda
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