90 Days of ILP

It's not a dark night, but it certainly is dim. With the bewildered gaze of bomb blast survivor, you survey the scene of your wrecked life and wonder: what happened? When your goal is clear, when the small engines of routine are humming beneath the soul's hood, you may act each day without doubt, certain that all things conspire to keep your self's ship afloat. But then, a split second of doubt punches its way through the hull, and in two days time the bow is sinking beneath the waves, and your practice has taken up residence in David Jones' locker.

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But to the committed practitioner of personal development, setbacks constitute more than a minor annoyance: they are speedbumps struck at 120 miles an hour.

I've had my run of setbacks in the last few weeks. As if in spite of the glorious analysis written at the 90-day mark, since that time, with the death of my aunt, the trip to New York, and the realization that being a novelist is next to impossible -- not to mention the new deadlines heaping atop my work plate -- I've found it difficult to get up at 8 in the morning, and even more difficult to practice my ILP, work on my art, and get to work on time. I'm drinking more, sleeping less, and for the most part worrying. I worry about the future, about my health, about the world and my place in it. "What should I do with my life?" has become the sole occupation of my free time, and I am as starved for answers now as when I was 16.

But there are glimmers of hope in the night sky, which prevent it from going truly black.