The hardest part about writing a book is when you don’t have the fire. It’s you against the machine. You force yourself to type something — anything to spark a paragraph, an idea, a tiny stroke of insight.

Instead you bring your little machine to a tiny oasis called a city park, painstakingly picking that little brain in the middle of a summer breeze. A band plays cool rythms on the lawn. The children dart in and out of a mother’s reach. A bird takes a quick bath in the pond. And once again, my page lays blank.

This is what Steven Pressfield calls Resistance. The ultimate enemy of the muse, Resistance has come in the form of a beautiful summer day. It’s a good day to be alive; not a good day to write a book.

Oh yeah. About that book.

The hardest part to grasp while working on the book is the idea of recovery. Yes, I do realize this little gliltch happens to be the crux of the entire project. Despite this, I’m not so much as worried but caught in a dillemma.

I’m starting to find out that recovery means something different to each person. From the research that I’ve been gathering, many people do not identify with the scientific community’s definition. Sometimes recovery seems like a lofty, distant, unreachable goal, while other times we may reach recovery, only to fall down from the heavens and back into Dante’s seventh circle of hell.

So is recovery something to attain, to touch, to grab on to? Or is it something more abstract — something that lies on a continuum, something to integrate into our daily lives, something to cultivate? In other words, is the important question about recovery itself or instead, about recovering?

I don’t have any answer right now. I’m on the journey too, trying to figure out what it means to me personally as well. And while I figure it out, I’ll let the summer day inspire me instead of work against me. It’s beautiful day to be alive, after all.