life: acoustic & amplified

Beginning Every Day

I used to believe a lot of things that no longer seem to fit into my strategy for making sense of this world. Considering some of those beliefs, I consider this progress. For instance, I’ve heard it said that beginning something is the hardest part. That if we can just get the ball rolling, momentum alone will take us from there. “Once begun, half done…”

I used to believe that.

But in my experience, we’re not much like boulders rolling down a hill. Well, except when things go badly, then, it seems, we roll with the best of them, right on down to the bottom. But as it concerns the finer things – those that we know will elevate us, make us better people, allow us to contribute more to the world and its people, experience more genuine love and joy – in those cases, it’s been my experience that in fact, beginning is very easy.

One small choice followed by action and it’s done. I don’t wish to minimize this, there’s amazing power in beginning something that brings a little bit more of us into the world. What I love most is the sense of peace and calm and contentment I feel in that moment. It’s perfect and abundant and feels like it will easily spill over into the next moment, the next day, and replace whatever it was that had been holding its place before. But beginning, while significant, is nowhere near the hardest part.

Have you ever started a rigorous physical training of any sort, after a long break?

There’s a certain excitement in it. And it’s easy to harness that excitement and turn it into resolve, into a determination to begin.

Our creative endeavors are like that, too. It’s easy to get excited about a new web project or a story idea or countless other outlets for that energy. And it’s even pretty easy to begin again on day two, to roll with the alleged momentum that starting seemed to initiate. But as with muscles that haven’t been worked in years, day two isn’t the problem. We feel it, but just enough to be proud of ourselves for beginning. For starting down a road that, while not perfectly paved, surely leads somewhere good. But day three? Day three makes us question our initiative. It reminds us what it’s like to get hurt and it encourages us to doubt our determination, to fear where it might take us.

Day three exists to help us justify mediocrity. To agree with us when we begin to defend cowardice or explain failure’s inevitability or judge others. Day three is there to help us forget the reasons for day one in the first place, and to keep us from getting to day four unscathed.

But damn it, we need day four.

Why? Because it means we beat day three, at least this once, and if we did it once, we can do it again. Because it’s just enough of a victory to remind us what’s possible. Because without it, good things become just like the things that came before them, instead of becoming something more. Something great. Something worthy.

Does day five and beyond get any easier? Not really, at least not for me, at least not so far. But I think that’s alright. Easy may indicate mastery, but not growth. To the contrary, I think. And this is where things seem to have gotten a bit tricky. Our culture, our society, celebrates mastery but, frankly, it ignores the growth that led to it. The daily regimen of effort that made it all possible, and that continues to do so (you didn’t think the masters sit back w/ their feet up, having ‘arrived’?).

Which means many either see mastery as a skill that others are born with and, so, don’t even bother to try, or we see it as an entitlement, erroneously believing that it will ‘just happen’. Neither option, in my view, seems to gush with wonder. With amazement. With a proper reverence for the miracle of life or our duty to expand it by way of our very existence.

And without wonder and amazement and duty, what have we? Well, we have this. And by ‘this’ I mean mediocrity. Dissatisfaction. Disenchantment. Apathy. Fear. Despair. It’s understandable or course, which is precisely why it persists. We can justify it, rationalize it. But if we ever want something more, we need to get past the starting line and get on with the hard work that being wonderful and amazing and dutiful require.

We need to begin, and then begin again. And again. Everyday. Forever.

From How to Matter Blog   http://howtomatter.com/beginning-every-day/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Howtomattercom+%28HowToMatter.com%29