I’m sick of having half-baked ideas of what I might like to do or activities I’ve always wanted to try. This period of my life is for getting in and doing these things … or letting them go entirely. Either is fine, as long as they get out of the ether of my head and are either pinned down into a more concrete form or dismissed.
So how do I do this? Start with the end in mind, Start as you mean to go on. The important word in both those sentences is ‘start’. Just start. What’s the very first thing I need to do to actually start? There is always one simple action that can put me on the road to what I want to do.
The first step may hardly be a step at all. It might be looking up the names of music teachers in the phone book. (The second step would be phoning.) The smaller the step, the less challenging it is and the more likely that you will do it. Somehow just looking up the number is not threatening but the thought of ringing straight away is. So write the number on the list of tasks. That’s the step for today. One day—perhaps tomorrow— I’ll look at that entry and suddenly it will be easy to pick up the phone and start the ball rolling.
The other aspect is that some of the activities we’d like to do are things we’d simply like to try rather than make them a permanent part of our lives. I think it’s quite legitimate to have that attitude with everything. I’m just going to try this for a while. I’ll put my heart into it while I’m trying it, but it’s also okay to say that I’ve had a go and I’m happy with that, then be able to drop it without guilt or a feeling of failure or giving up. I’ve done that with a few interests and have reached a place where I can say I’m happy I’ve had the experience but I don’t need to be the world’s best at that skill or try to carry it through the rest of my life.
What a relief that is. I get to do the things I want to do but don’t need to feel, when starting, that I need be tied to it forever if it’s something for which I end up having a relatively short attention span. And I don’t get to the end of my life wishing I’d had a go at piano, bricklaying, pottery, singing, leadlighting, cello, my own website …
On my deathbed I don’t want to have regrets that I let life pass by without trying activities that take my fancy. I don’t want to die wondering.