Work, after all, at its best, is one of the great human gateways to the eternal and timeless.*
David Whyte

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.**
Chuck Close

Inspiration follows perseverance.

It’s not only about turning up –
You’ll be glad to here,
But it is about
you
turning up –
Not trying to be someone else;
And though you may have strayed
from your self,
There’s still time
and possibility
to respond to the call of you:
When we arrive on earth,
we are provided with no map for our life journey.
Only gradually,
as our identity forms
and we get an inkling of who we are,
do possibilities begin to emerge
that call us.^

You are not only
naturally you, but
also the person you have chosen to be –
The hard work of becoming you
that you have persevered in.

As for writing, so for life:
And like “flow,” “natural” is one of the words behind 
writer’s block.
So let’s suppose there’s no such thing as writer’s block.
There’s loss of confidence
And forgetting to think
And failing to prepare
And not reading enough
And giving up on patient
And hastening to write
And learning your audience
And never really trying to understand how sentences
work.
Above all, there’s never learning to trust yourself
Or your capacity to learn or think or perceive.^^

When you turn up
again and again,
You will find enough:
If we go down to ourselves, we find that we possess
exactly what we desire.*^

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
**Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals;
^John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us;
^^Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
*^Simone Weil, from John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.