Starting is the thing

"Ready to start? Let's go.." that's what the prompt text in the Peakd editor says. I hadn't realised this before I came here to write something about the importance of just starting.

It's one of those things that feels trivial and silly. Of course it's important to start! But it's also ridiculously hard sometimes to even get there. Or perhaps it's that the idea of what "starting" means is wrong. Starting a piece of writing isn't the bit where I walk around the park thinking about the world and what's going on in my head. It isn't the bit where I think "I really ought to write something about that" or even tell other people "I've been thinking about this, I'm going to write something about it." When I'm doing this I still haven't started yet.

It isn't when I've sat at my desk at the beginning of the day and do some journaling to find out what's on top of my mind. Even though I have a pen in my hand, I haven't started the writing yet. Neither is it when I pop downstairs for a cup of coffee and get the ideas in the right order while the kettle boils.

It is when I finally open an editor of some kind and I start writing sentences, with the intention, in the case of something like this of pressing publish fairly soon. It doesn't matter how far away from the final version I am when I start, how many times I revise and delete and amend and switching things around, I have started when I've really started and am wrestling this idea out of my head and onto the screen or to paper or whatever other medium it's going to be created in.

And when it's over, it's over!