Starting Again

My friends, today I’d like to share a great secret with all of you.

You can have as many ideas and good intentions as you want.  You can have goals and dreams and freaking aspirations.  You can give yourself pep talks.  You can have a production schedule.  You can even actually write things down on a calendar.  You can have a plan.

But if you get a head cold from hell, none of that matters.  Everything – everything – comes to a full, complete, dead stop while you deal with rivers of mucus and sinus pain making you want to yank out all of your teeth and trying not to hack up a lung every night.

Trust me.  I speak from sad, sad experience on this one because this is how I’ve spent my last couple of weeks.

*sigh*

Let’s just say that creativity has not been top of mind lately.  In fact, nothing has been top of mind.  Except congestion.

The good news is I can finally say I’m feeling back to normal.  The bad news is that now I have to start again.

I think everyone knows how hard it is to get moving once you’ve come to a complete stop.  As Sir Isaac Newton says:

An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force.

An object in motion continues in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

If you are at a standstill and you want to move, you have to apply force to get moving.  And that can be a LOT easier said than done – it’s ridiculous how hard it can be to get going once you’ve stopped.

I think it’s because when you’re moving, you don’t really pay attention to what you’re doing.  You just know that you’re moving.  But when you come to a complete stop, you look at the overwhelming mountain you’re trying to climb and you freeze because it seems impossible.

That’s where I am right now.

Now the question isn’t whether I should start again – because of course I should.  The question is HOW do I start again?  How do I start to climbing when the hurdle looks impossible from where I’m standing?  How do I get going again when I don’t have any momentum?

How?

Maybe the first thing I need to do is not be angry or disappointed with myself because my body needed a full stop.  Maybe I can’t be discouraged and give up simply because I couldn’t keep going the way I thought that I should. Maybe I need to realize that this is life, and life happens.

Then I need to start small.  Instead of looking at the big picture, I need to find tasks I can complete.  For the writing part of my life, that means writing this blog post and the February newsletter.  Next, is actually opening the document I’m editing, even though I’m terrified that I’ll never ever ever ever be able to find my footing.  Then I need to start reading that document.  Then I need to sink into the actual editing.

The focus is on moving forward, step by step, inch by inch.

Starting again.

And…here we go.