HOW TO BEGIN

If this were a letter to a butterfly, it’d be dead by now.

The letter, and the butterfly.

Both images inspire me to get off my proverbial ass after 11 months of meaning to finish this essay, aptly entitled “How to Begin”. Let this mini-eon not become the gestation period of any subsequent blog entries.

Yet that is how such ventures have gone in my short life: big idea – lots of fantasizing about how great the fruition of that idea will be – start off with great vigor and audacity – diligent for a week if I’m lucky – arrive at the realization that this task will take work and it will not be perfect – and said task is damned to the purgatory between love and apathy, nurture and neglect, courage and cowardice.

*

Part of this habit is part of my nature. Gemini is my sign; in Chinese astrology, I’m a wood rabbit. Instigation, initiation, inspiration: these are my affinities, my comfort zones. Although as proved via a cassette recording made without my consent at the tender age of eight, I have a fair share of neuroses surrounding the beginning of things as well.

“How to Make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich.” Each of us had to “teach” our third grade class how to do something, to get familiar with organizing instruction. I chose what I thought was simple and useful. And the night before the presentation, I went over it perhaps 30 times, in a row, always starting with the refrain “How to Make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich.”

First, you take out the bread. No, first, you take out the peanut butter and jelly. Or first, you take out the cutting board and a knife. First you put the bread on the cutting board?
Every SINGLE iteration of making this deceptively basic sandwich, I tested it. Rehearsed it. With my tiny hands, tried to beat it into flawless submission.

*

I don’t even remember how I began the actual presentation. But at the less tender age of 32, I realize I still have the same tremendous fear of starting something that won’t be perfect. Or correct. A B+. Mediocre. Meaningless.

Luckily what I also have are 1,000 lessons stockpiled in my bunker of self-doubt, magical weapons that battle the fallacy of perfection and fortify the power of pluck.

These lessons show me that fear does not have to stop you, that it can be present and not dominant. Yet still in the foreground are my questions: why do we slide effortlessly into bad habits and struggle industriously to create good ones? How much help do you need to change your behavior? Do you need to forgive yourself for all the other starts and disappointments that have come before? If you’ve given up 100 times, what makes it worthwhile to try the 101st time?

I am starting so many new things, so I’ve spent a good deal of time contemplating these stumpers. My answers seem to still be swaddled in questions.
You start by understanding your motivations?… Setting the right intention?…Doing the requisite amount of preparation, then letting go of your expectations?…Praying for divine guidance or the other-worldly lighting of a fairly-worldly fire under your otherwise-proverbial ass?

*

I don’t know.

I have tried all and none of these things, depending on the endeavor at hand.

I can’t even say with measured certainty that it’s different for everyone, or every enterprise.

I’m not even convinced that it matters.

But I do know there exists a delicious moment, before the butterfly’s last gasp and the quietus of a great idea, where you just

begin

.


And that
is enough.