I’m sitting at my computer writing words on the screen. My feet are encased in red socks, my legs in purple slacks, and I have a red-purple jumper on covered by a black vest. I’ve had a late lunch and feel quite full. I’m sitting writing these words because I have to start somewhere. I’d set myself the task of regular writing and I intend to be regular. Mostly I am, sometimes I’m not. I can procrastinate endlessly, I know that, but I know, too, that – at the heart – I am a disciplined person. I think, in this regard, I’m like my now deceased father. He was an architect and during the war, also a naval officer. Disciplined and accustomed to getting things done. So here I am, writing now from where I am.
The sun is setting behind late May clouds. It’s been a mild day. Rain is forecast for tonight. I will swim down at the beach tomorrow morning. I’m told the water is still quite warm, as it was last week. The seaweed is banking up on the seashore and it’s looking wintery.
I sit here writing these words because this is exactly what I knew I would do. I wanted to say, as many have said before me, that all endeavours start with right now. Miro, the Catalan artist (1893 - 1983), began his surrealist pieces with a single dot and from that dot elaborated all else. Things evolve from right now. The single seed becomes the mighty tree. In the beginning was the word… All that is began thus.
Plans and imaginings begin here. They start as a small bub, nothing more.
I often hear from my clients that they want to start something new, but because the idea isn’t fully clothed in their mind, they can’t even begin. This is folly. No enterprise begins fully formed. They can’t because everything is open to change. Things are altered in reaction to other events, and shaped accordingly. Things are emergent entities and relational. The acorn receives its ability to grow in relation to moisture, temperature, nutrients – not just the germ of its own self.
Beginning comes with risk. Who know what will become of anything. Beginning enters existence and perhaps comes to nothing. In the end, does it really matter? Beginning can blossom into something extraordinary, or not. It is exciting just allowing something to happen. We learn from whatever happens.
The philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) saw “now” is not merely anchoring yourself in the present but projecting your future possibilities onto the concrete reality of your past. In other words, “now” is not a point in time, but “flow. Starting now is thus a culmination of what was before along with what is to come in relation to whatever you encounter all the way in the doing of a thing.
Where you are now is human existence (Dasein). You are an integration of past, present and future possibilities and the doing of anything is just this. Everything begins just here. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain.
I am reminded of Ted Hughes’ (1930- 1998) wonderful poem, “The Thought Fox”. It’s about the essential mysteriousness of beginning any piece, and just letting it happen. Here is the entire poem (included, because it’s incredibly beautiful):
“I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.”
