It seems to me like you’ve always harnessed your destiny and gone towards what your soul tells you. I feel like I’ve constantly ignored my various callings out of fear and anxiety. Never choosing a road but letting the road choose me. How do I let go of fear and procrastination to live a life worth living?

Dear Marisa,

I have often spoken about procrastination as an obstacle to creativity, but perhaps, in my efforts to encourage people to discover their potential, I have not fully acknowledged just how challenging it can be. The fear and anxiety you are talking about is very real. I am working on lyrics for a new album right now and am also about to go on tour, and even though I’ve written hundreds of songs and performed countless times, the trepidation is acute, sometimes verging on paralysing.

Our fears around starting something new, risky and exposed are genuine. But here lies the maddening paradox – these anxieties, the very things that prevent us from moving forward, are intrinsic to that motion. I was talking about this only recently with a ceramicist friend, Adam Silverman, and he said that I was “stirring the pot” and, in doing so, revealing something of my soul. He said it was little wonder I felt scared. Of course, I know this to be true, I’ve been here countless times, but it’s good to be reminded, and his words calmed me down a little. I also know, in my heart, that if there is one thing more daunting than writing a song, it’s not writing one – and I think we can apply this to many things, a job left undone is its own torment, a dream unrealised, its own kind of hell. There is a unique joy, the deepest satisfaction and a kind of spiritual appeasement in knowing that something we have made, or worked on, means something to somebody else. We may need to leap through these hoops of fire, wrestling against forces that hold us back from reaching our potential. Yet, understanding that struggle energises the work itself, turning creativity into a beautiful war – perhaps the noblest contest of them all.

Marisa, live as creatively and boldly as your heart allows. Keep a light grip on the reins, take a breath, step into the unknown and trust. Trust – the active heart of faith, a word so fragile, so essential, so easily forgotten. Have faith and do – and in the luminous words of Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic who wrote from her tiny penitential cell, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

May you find a long and love-filled life worth living, Marisa.

Love, Nick

Ask a Question