“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”
I wish I’d said that. But I didn’t. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe did. I initially encountered that quote on a card my cousin gave me when I set out to publish my first book. And it’s the only thing by Goethe I’ve ever read, so I’m making no claims at scholarship here.
But the words stuck with me. Partly because they ring true, partly because that card is tacked to my bulletin board. I tend to zero in on three of the eighteen words: begin, boldness, and magic. It takes boldness to begin. Beginning unlocks magic.
The power of beginning cannot be overstated. A lot of people get hung up on being sure, on “knowing where to begin.” One of the few true cliché’s in life is, “I don’t know where to begin.” Hogwash. You do know. You begin at the beginning. And that’s all a beginning is for—to get you started.
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can … .” Those words are no less important than the three I singled out. They help you identify your starting point, and you’ll notice, they offer a fairly broad sweep. It’s like writer’s block. People think writer’s block is the inability to think of something to write. That’s false. Writer’s block is not liking the ideas you’re coming up with. It’s being afraid of them, embarrassed by them, ashamed of them. It takes a Zen master years to achieve a totally empty mind. Can it really be as easy as we writers claim? You mean all that meditation and discipline can be replaced by simply sitting down and picking up a pen? Nonsense. Most writers are cursed with far too many ideas, not a dearth of them. The problem we struggle with is picking one. But here again, it doesn’t matter which one you pick. The right one will come along if you just get moving. It’s like a log jam. Get those first few tiresome ideas out of the way by writing them down, and the rest will break free. Writing down useless ideas is a useful thing to do. Take this blog for instance.
My own experience as a writer is an example of this process. I once read that when you set out to write a book, you may have to write an entire novel just to get it out of the way so you can write the novel you’re really trying to write. That seems like a terrible waste of time. I remember the years, YEARS, of frustration I went through when I was trying to get Silverlance written. I remember a night, in the monastery in Ireland, when I went out to the burn barrel with about 500 pages of material. It was the middle of the night. I was all alone. I burned all 500 pages. I did it because I was frustrated. I had poured all this thought and heart and hope into all this work that had added up to nothing. Or so I thought. About a month later I sat down to start again and I had this explosion of ideas that I will never forget. Suddenly the whole thing was clear. I wrote for about 12 hours straight and got it all out. Somewhere in that process I realized that all the work of the previous years had been exploration crucial to understanding the details of what I was about to do. I needed to explore the territory by creating it. Now I write from that knowledge—knowledge I could not have reached any other way. Those 500 pages were not a waste of time. I had a whole lot more to show for my efforts than I first imagined.
I think life is like that. All the trial and error is not wasted time. Just begin. Do SOMETHING. Sculpt. Write. Paint. Study plants or bugs or economics. Pick something that interests you and begin. That magic Goethe mentioned won’t—can’t— kick in until you do. Destiny is waiting. Desire is the first sign of talent. Talent is the first sign of destiny. The motion of beginning will open a door you didn’t know was there. Go through it. You’ll find another door. Go through that one, too. That’s how it works.
And it really is magic. That’s the only word for it.
Peter Crowell http://www.petertcrowell.com/blog/
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