The Journey is New Each Day
I’ve been on the journey of consulting for a lot of years in one form or another.
But meanwhile, this is the beginning of my journey of consistent content creation — the beating of the same clear drum each day, until people can hear you with a certain frequency (in both senses of the word).
And as someone who’s been great at starting things, it really occurred to me thus: people love to talk about the starting of things as the big deal. “Just get started! Once you get started, everything will fall into place,” etc. There is practically a total inspiration industry around getting things started. You can buy a new book. Lay out your new journal on the kitchen table, ready for your first morning, fresh and clean.
Starting is awesome, but once you get started, you wake up the next morning. And now, you must start again. After a while, the endeavor is no longer imbued with the glamor of starting. And now, you must draw upon the resources of continuing.
Everyone glamorizes the work of beginning. But the work of beginning again and again and again — each new day — is its own new set of learnings and discoveries. And beginning for the first time is no more important than beginning for the 147th.
The practice of continuing teaches us a whole different set of things. Perhaps it’s how not to exhaust ourselves. Or how to weave our efforts into the flow of what we’re doing already. Or how to create it as a fun thing in our day.
When our practice becomes something we’ve woven our lives; when we wake up realizing it's something we just do; then, I think we will have gotten the knack of continuing.
Still, this particular knack has as much to do with the resources we draw upon when things don’t go as expected, so the practice can continue anyway. Perhaps we learn to pile up some posts ahead of time, or find some tricks to get it done well but without anxiety.
There is no tight conclusion to this piece, just as there is no tight conclusion to the practice. And the horizon opens up to something new; to the new world that opens when we move from start to continue.
