On Ganesha and how you handle an obstacle in your path

It's not even a week since New Years day and I'm feeling really good about things, really grateful.  I've had some good freelance work come in, my yoga practice feels great and I've been cooking delicious, healthy food and gobbling it up.

I know this is the easy part though.  I'm feeling motivated and things are organized — so checking off the things on the list is a joy and goes by in a breeze.

The challenge will really come when I'm not feeling motivated, when life throws something in my way.

Even though Ganesha (the dude in the picture) is known as the remover of obstacles, a yoga teacher said in an online class I took a few weeks ago that he actually likes to put something in your way when you're on the wrong path.

I like that idea.  It follows along with the "everything happens for a reason" motto.  So I'm putting the idea in the memory bank (and on this blog in case the memory bank teller goes on vacation) for the next time Ganesha — or the universe, or your dead uncle harry, or God (however you like to word it) — puts a big old bolder in my way, or a pebble in my shoe, or a bump in the sidewalk.

Because I know these things will happen.  It's part of life.

Still, I'm not sitting around waiting...

I've hit above my word count goals for the first two days of ROW80 and most likely will again tonight.  The writing is going pretty smoothly right now since I decided to begin Book 2 again from scratch after writing 20,000 words of it and feeling like something big just wasn't working.  Now that I've figured out what that something big is I feel a lot more comfortable going forward.

Have you ever had that feeling — when you've started something but you feel like something's not right?  And then instead of that feeling going away it just turns into neon flashing lights in your brain — often without a decipherable message?

That's always been a signal for me (not that it happens all the time) to turn around, go back the way I came, and figure out an alternate route.

Or maybe you're a plough on through person?  The kind that knows he/she may have made a couple of dents or blunders along the way but is perfectly content going back and fixing them, and then fixing everything else so the whole thing fits together.

I'm sure there's pluses or minuses to either approach.  Part of writing, part of life, is making mistakes and there's always more than one way to fix them, I think.  Don't you?

Just don't give up....as Kristen Cashore says, never surrender!