I got stuck yesterday, and I've been wondering why.

I tried, early in the morning, to sign on to the blog and create my next post, and found that my server was down and I couldn't get online. Every time I attempted to get to anywhere beyond my home page from the day before, I ran into one useless pop-up box or another. I fumed, I closed the boxes, I tried again and again to refresh my home page. Eventually I called the number for my internet service provider and got a recording telling me what I already knew: that my service was down for about the fourth time in the six months I've had it.

At that point, frustrated, I wandered through the house in the dim light. It was about six, and my wife was still sleeping. The light was just starting to rise outside. I thought about sitting down to write. After all, I had notes in the notebook that I carry around with me; I had a perfectly good word processing program on my computer; I had a jump drive with ample space for me to put my thoughts down, and I could always upload them to the blog whenever it was finally functioning again.

But I didn't do any of those things.

I sat in the living room and mumbled to myself about the shortcomings of my ISP. I looked on the shelves for books that I've never read that I really should get around to reading and began randomly pulling them down and browsing through them aimlessly. Finally, of course, I turned on the television but couldn't tell you what I watched during the time I killed until I had to take my shower and start getting ready for work.

Why didn't I spend that time writing? I know the satisfaction I feel when I do it; I know how good it is for me emotionally and mentally. But I let the insignificant interruption of not being able to post my writing keep me from writing at all.

I've been thinking a lot about the things I interpose between the myself and what I know nourishes me. There's a line in the Indigo Girls song, "Watershed," that says, "Better learn how to starve the emptiness and feed the hunger." But over and over again, I see myself doing the opposite: feeding the emptiness and starving the hunger.

I think it has something to do with the stories I create in my head about who and what I am. Earlier in my life, I thought it was best to get rid of those narratives, to just deal with reality. But somehow that's never seemed to happen. Whenever I think I'm starting from zero, just taking life as it comes, I find myself in a session of marathon television watching, or playing hundreds of consecutive games of Minesweeper or Solitaire. No, some guiding story always operates in how I live my life, whether I created it consciously or not, and it doesn't always have my best interests at heart.

I'm tempted to believe that I need to start all over again, create a completely new sense of myself. I would give myself all the attributes and goals I "should" have: more ambitious, more meticulous, more disciplined. But I'm also old enough to know that I can't start from scratch; I have to begin where I am. The question is, in that jumbled combination of experiences and values and quirks, what should stay and what should go? What do I cling to and what do I release?

I've come to believe that definitions can make all the difference in this struggle to create a story of myself that keeps me moving forward. For example, defining myself as a writer has always sustained me. But if my sense of what it means to be a writer hadn't evolved, I wouldn't be putting these words down now. I'd have concluded a long time ago that I would never fit the image of what a writer is supposed to be.

A pilgrim is always a traveler, and every traveler has to face these questions. What can I take with me on this journey? How much can I carry? What do I need right now and what can I pick up along the way? What will be most useful, most important? And what will I need to leave behind?

I learned from yesterday, if I didn't know it before, how much I need to sort through the possessions I've been carrying around in my mind and heart. I need to keep rewriting the story. Of course, on every trip I've ever taken, I've also made mistakes in my choices of what to carry. So I'm hoping that the journey itself, if I keep to it, will revise my story and help show me what I need to keep and what I need to let go. This morning my server is back up, and I'm writing again.