The Challenge of Starting
By Molly Barker
Why does starting something often feel like such a challenge? Why is “the beginning” always so daunting?
I practice yoga almost five days a week. I’m a recent yoga convert, having been a runner for most of my life up until about a year ago. Running provided for me, and still does (just not as often), a space to be quiet, listen inward and explore the landscapes around me both physically and within.
In yoga, the majority of my time in class, I find myself “observing” my thoughts rather than responding to them. One of my favorite poses is called “Dancer.” It requires a great deal of balance as well as a high level of trust in your ability to hold the pose.
I fall out of that pose more often than I can hold it. And then with time still left to move back into the pose, I do so, but always with reluctance. It is often much easier to just stand and wait for the teacher to release the class from the pose and move onto the next one. In the private world of my own brain I find that it is often easier to just do nothing rather than “begin again.” Even in the small moment of my yoga practice, I find “beginning” or “starting” to be, at times, so difficult… so difficult in fact I do nothing instead.
When I started Girls on the Run, the most challenging step wasn’t the thinking about it or visualizing the possibilities, it was actually taking the concept from the internal cogs of my thoughts to the world outside… where you, me and others could see and participate in the concept. Actually sitting down to write out the mission statement, the vision, core values and first lesson required time and discipline, two things I felt as if I didn’t have. I was looking for excuses… new motherhood, training for a marathon, tending to my marriage. I was waiting for the right time, the right circumstances, the right “out there” to make it easy for the “in here” to begin.
Ironically, once I wrote out the first lesson, the rest began to flow like water over a waterfall… there was no containing it… the words came, the people came and now the program exists in a space that is expansive, life changing and beyond anything I ever dreamed possible.
From one word on a page…
Maybe beginning or starting is difficult because it takes us into a space of the unknown… to places we haven’t been before. We are launching down a path of what we don’t know. Looking our “don’t know-ed-ness square in the eye” requires an effort, courage and a willingness to “fall out of the pose”… to then start again next time with a slightly different stance, attitude and open-mind. Often I find it is much easier to just wait it out and sit in the comfort of what I do know, even if the anxiety, depression and/or frustration produced by doing so, occupies a tremendous amount of my time and energy.
Today, I’m going to embrace starting again. I’m going to be aware of when I’m reacting to life rather than “cre-acting” to life. I’m going to embrace the process of starting, beginning and trust that the process will take me into realms of the unknown… which will broaden, expand and introduce me to new elements of myself which, in turn, need and want to be brought into the world.
What’s holding you back from beginning again… starting something… cre-acting your life?
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Molly Barker, MSW, founded Girls on the Run in 1996 in Charlotte. A four-time Hawaii Ironman triathlete, she used her background in social work, counseling and teacher, along with research on adolescent issues, to develop the program. Today, there are Girls on the Run councils in over 160 cities across North American serving over 70,000 girls each year.
