Hard beginnings

There it wasn’t so difficult, typing the first word. Reading this, I understand that your perspective may be different, but starting new ventures or musical instruments or ideas are hard for me. In this case, beginning new things in our lives can be quite challenging. Maybe you make a list or a target, a goal or you write a whole list of accomplishments on a post-it note and you become excited or daunted about the next step. And then actually continuing on that path results in overcoming a serious mental block. For me, I can see myself after the beginning somehow, but I find the start to be a confusing place. It’s a new experience, a place where you have no memories.

For a couple of years now, I’ve got a journal where I add to it, on and off, about anything small or big, most of it things I don’t want to forget because I know the pace of life with school and extracurricular and my personal goals makes it hard to keep track of everything. I seem to keep a little better care of my personal schedule which itself is a flexible mess (I’m working on improving it though). When I started, I found the experience of recording days to be calming and it gave me perspective about my thoughts and actions, thinking about them a second time. It takes a considerable portion of an hour for me, so as of late writing down days and moments hasn’t been something I’m doing, but a part of me that I'll enjoy getting back to. Sometimes what you should do and the decisions we should make are often realised way after we wanted to try, and this was the case with the journal. I wanted to start earlier so I’d have more written down events of my life, more days noted. Yet, I realised that rarely happens with many things, because we don’t take a step back in our lives as often as we should. We don’t choose to see ourselves from another perspective. Perhaps, take a look at yourself, from a friend, family member, future or past self. Just take a look around. I’m asking you to think about the choices you make because they’ll define you over time. As hard as it’s to aim for the goals and aspirations that we yearn of, I believe taking the time to notice our actions, self and personality impacting others, can help us achieve more.

In terms of beginning, I spend a lot of time deciding how to start in the way I’d want to, in the best possible way and I care a lot about this. When overall, the beginning while important, shows the progress and journey taken in the time between. It doesn’t define anything, but the repetition of yourself in the next year or five, in our daily routine, the choices we make and what we begin matter more than the manner of how we begin. For me, that makes starting much less daunting and makes starting exciting evermore so than never trying.