Start Where You Are

It sounds trite. Ridiculous maybe. Or so obvious as to be redundant. But ‘starting where you are’ is more important than one might think at first glance.

There’s an apocryphal story about a lost tourist who asks a man standing at the side of the road can he give him directions to such-and-such a place. The man proceeds to give the tourist detailed and convoluted directions, finishing up with “Sure, it’s a terrible hard place to get to. It’d be much easier if you didn’t start from here.”

If we want to implement or create some change in our lives, or manage some change that has been thrust upon us, then the only place we can start that from is here. Now. If your company makes you redundant, then, yes, it would obviously have been much better to have started looking for a new job six months ago, but… we can’t time travel. We have deal with the situation we find ourselves in today. If you aspire to being a strong swimmer, well, yes of course it would’ve been better if you’d learned to swim as a child and practiced regularly since then, but if you didn’t do that and you still want to be a good swimmer then the only place you can start that journey from is here and now.

Life is not lived in remembering what you did in the past. Neither is it lived in imagining what you might do in the future. Both of those very human activities have their place: it can be good to reflect on the past and inspiring to imagine and plan for the future. But living is done here and now, today. This is the only place and time in which you can make choices and take action to shape the course of your life.

Neither do you have to do everything today. Don’t overburden yourself. If you want to learn to draw well, you do a little drawing practice every day (or most days). And after six months or a year, you notice that you can draw much, much better than you did a year earlier. But practicing for 24 hours straight won’t get you there. Small, repeated actions bear huge cumulative results in time as well as building new habits which in time become new ways of living.