Who or what are your bananas?

Overly ripe bananas distract me. They stalk me as I pour my coffee or leave my basement office to grab the anthology I had been reading the night before last. With 50 or so quick minutes, overly ripe bananas can become banana bread or banana oatmeal cookies. A thick swipe of peanut butter and you have the perfect, inexpensive snack.

I can tell you where every grocery store displays their ripe bananas and I have been known to sprint into the store to purchase—you guessed it—overly ripe bananas.

As much as I crave true immersion in my project, why do I let myself fall prey to the brown spotted fruit? Sometimes it’s simply easier to stand up and walk away from my desk than to get that sentence right, to figure out if this is the proper form for this piece or if I need to keep searching.

Sometimes when we are writing and facing questions about our work, we crave the certainty of what is known and then it becomes nearly impossible to remain in the silence—to think about anything else but the distraction that grows ever larger….but I’ve found that if I tell myself that I can have that snack if I write one more page, I’m somehow steadied. I’ve taken away some of the allure of those bananas. Distraction is real. So is false hunger.