Brain Food #690
Waiting to try something new
Thoughts of the day
Waiting to try something new is often linked to the arrival of a turning point in time, for a ‘right moment’. This is sometimes nudged on by the idea of new, temporal beginnings: a new week, a new month, a new year.
Yet, weeks are a manmade concept. Up until Caesar’s time, the year had ten months, not twelve. Only the seasons change, and even they are moving, drifting away from what we had initially defined them to be.
And so, new beginnings can occur even now, even today, on a Monday, in the middle of December, at the tail end of another year. New beginnings could be taking up a new hobby, trying a new activity that always piqued your curiosity, or larger beginnings, like starting to work on that book you always wanted to write, visiting a place you always dreamed of going to, or starting a new job.
From David Whyte’s Consolations, some thoughts on beginning, and the true essence of procrastination:
Beginning is difficult, and our procrastination is a fine, ever-present measure of our reluctance to take that first close-in, courageous step in reclaiming our happiness. Perhaps, because taking a new step always leads to a kind of radical internal simplification, where, suddenly, very large parts of us, parts of us we have kept gainfully employed for years, parts of us still rehearsing the old complicated story, are suddenly out of a job. There occurs in effect, a form of internal corporate downsizing, where the parts of us too afraid to participate or having nothing now to offer, are let go, with all of the accompanying death-like trauma, and where the very last fight occurs, a rear guard disbelief that this new, less complicated self, and this very simple step, is all that is needed for the new possibilities ahead.
It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: which is why we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities clouded by fear, the horizon safely in the distance, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility...
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