It Doesn’t Have to be Perfect, It Just Has to Start
I pick a topic and give it a title, and then….
Where to start? (drums fingers on table, thinking)
“Once upon a time?”
“Did you know…”
“Fun Fact:…”
“One time, at band camp…”
…(sigh)…
Oh the irony…..
I wonder if this is how the chick feels as it pecks its way out of the egg, somehow exhausted before the first crack lets in the light. Or, how the dragonfly nymph feels as it climbs out of the only home it’s ever known, restless with energy that urges “I don’t know why, but this thing that is the OPPOSITE of my known and navigable watery home must be the next right thing for me…?” And the caterpillar who opts to turn to goo for a decent chunk of its life…
There comes a time when these things happen. But how do they start?
It’s probably a good thing we are so very young (our brains and memory so newly formed) when we learn to walk, that we can’t recall the frustration, the tumbles, the lack of direction and balance, the embarrassment and humiliation of it. Imagining starting a thing like that — the fleshy weight of ourselves as we hoist our floppy soft body up and forward against gravity and with unformed muscle memory, drooling, likely delirious….it’s not pretty. It’s not perfect. But at some point, there WAS a start. If we did know how challenging it would be, we may never have taken the risk of that first step. And if we did remember the discomfort of the moment, we’d be hard pressed to ever attempt another new thing. If there is a comfort zone for being awkward, it is an art.
Starting something is often easier than we want to believe. We give into an urge, we explore a curiosity, we outgrow our space, or we tumble down a rabbit hole into a new thing without so much as a “whoopsie.” Sometimes it’s so easy, we don’t even know that we started.
But for many of us, starting something comes with a prerequisite of overthinking whose deep taproot is worrying about how to begin. And we stall. Or worse, we flat out freeze and fail to launch entirely. That blank canvas is too intimidating, the choices/possibilities are endless, the skills needed, too new and requiring years of practice to get us to the place we want to be now! And (gasp) what if we fail? One thing is for sure: if we don’t start, we can’t fail, or mess up, or look awkward, or get hurt, or hurt someone else, or….
…or succeed, learn something, grow, move, change, transform, create, discover. It just requires that first step. Occasionally some motivation occurs — someone really believes in us, or someone is depending on our success, or we are just kicked in the ass by the fuzzy-slippered foot of the universe (my title and topic for a future blog). Or, we receive a gift and it melts our icy heart, like the Winter Warlock from the 1970’s Christmas show “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” and break into a musical number about putting “one foot in front of the other.”
Bass/Rankin
If we are so lucky to have a motivator (good or bad), we still have to take that first step. Often it’s far from whatever perfection looks like. It’s messy. And uncomfortable. And not always forward, or linear. Sometimes it’s a real shitshow. A shitshow that might lead to meaningful transformation, a great piece of art, or a useful first draft. So if you’re stuck (and we ALL get stuck sometimes) just build enough confidence in knowing “It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to start.” Then trust your own timing and see where it leads.
Sometimes creating isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s just awkward as fuck. Take these praying mantis babies emerging from their egg case: they may look like they are holding on to one another for dear life and they are - creating a living tenuous scaffold of cramped and awkward soft bodies — but one day….they will rule the garden as a perfectly crafted sovereign predator. They just have to eat the other soft bodies in the scaffold first.