Women in Love - Between the Desire and the Spasm falls The Shadow

On many occasions, usually prolonged and sustained till resolution, I have felt paralysed by the anxiety of an obligation to be doing something with my life, to be producing something, industrious, full of purpose and focus.  And it is because of this overwhelming anxiety that I have in some cases failed to act and do as deliberately as I perhaps could and should have done, in fact restricting myself by looking for well worn paths to productivity.  As with many of these cuttings, the following conversation fills me with a nice sense of comfort both in its discussion of my feeling and in a fundamental sense of empowering me with a further ability to articulate these feelings afforded by the diverse use of language - something which I hope all these cuttings in some way facilitate.

'I DO enjoy things—don't you?' she asked.

'Oh yes! But it infuriates me that I can't get right, at the really growing part of me. I feel all tangled and messed up, and I CAN'T get straight anyhow. I don't know what really to DO. One must do something somewhere.'

'Why should you always be DOING?' she retorted. 'It is so plebeian. I think it is much better to be really patrician, and to do nothing but just be oneself, like a walking flower.'

'I quite agree,' he said, 'if one has burst into blossom. But I can't get my flower to blossom anyhow. Either it is blighted in the bud, or has got the smother-fly, or it isn't nourished. Curse it, it isn't even a bud. It is a contravened knot.' -pp.106-107

I especially like the final metaphor.  I wonder also if Lawrence is not only talking about the general human condition but also differentiating between the genders.  Regardless, a fantastic poem to read for more thought provoking sentiments on action and inaction is T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men' which has haunted me for many many years.  Here's a snippet followed by a link to the full poem:

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/