Oh – just start? Don’t worry? That’s almost comical, and always easier said than done.
I woke up this morning, and for the umpteenth time in the past two or more years, had a little niggle in the back of my head saying, “Start writing today.”
I haven’t written a word for this blog since October 2019. Can you even begin to wrap your mind around how much has happened between then and now? It feels like a lifetime of events all mushed together into a hazy, roiling ball of faint memories. Through it all, I didn’t sit down even once to connect my words to my feelings about any of it.
This morning, the niggle to write was growing to a nagging. Like, now is the time to get back to it. There are things to talk about, to say, to reach out to you about, if only to get them out of my head and heart, and into the ether of the interwebs.
There will always be something that will come up to derail our best plans of staying on task. I notice my sneaky procrastination patterns when I have a deadline to meet, like, how I find myself urgently needing to straighten the junk drawer, or research the state capital of Missouri, or Google the breed of my neighbor’s dog.
The point is to just pick a time (hint: the time is now) and start. Don’t worry about getting it perfect, at first. A habit is formed by simply starting and then each day committing to doing it again. Somewhere down the line, in a few weeks or months, you can focus on refining your technique, build on what you’ve started, clean up the edges of your practice, grow and improve on the foundation you set.
What have you been putting off, since yesterday, or the beginning of this year, or since October 2019, like me? Is something nagging you to start on it today?
There’s a reason the nagging comes. It’s saying, hey, time is precious. Time is limited. The days that have gone by will soon – or, maybe already are, we can’t know – be more than the days we have ahead of us in this lifetime. What an absolute honor to be gifted this journey of humanness, with all of its intense ecstasy and suffering, its humbling joy and heartbreak.
Just start. Don’t worry. Every time you choose to begin, new doors open, new opportunities arise, new chapters are written for your life story, each one with the potential to be even more amazing than you could have dreamed up for yourself.
“Each morning I wake as one woman, and by nightfall I’ve become another.” – Fia Skye
Positively Tasha 