In the movie Peaceful Warrior from 2006 (also listed on my links page) there’s a quote that one of the characters say, which took me a few years to fully understand. Only after doing all this inner work for more than a decade I was able to finally understand this sentence.
“There is no starting or stopping, only doing.”
It’s something to think about as you travel through your life. We are taught to look at thinks as if we should start and finish every one of them but not all things have a beginning and an end. For instance, cleaning the dishes will never end, every time you do the dishes after a few hours or a few meals you have to clean them again (unless you’re messy and just let everything sit there 😉 ). The dishes won’t clean themselves, even if you have a dishwasher you need to do some work in the process, and it’s not something you can start and stop or finish ever.
So why do we pretend it is?
When something we need to do doesn’t feel desirable for us or isn’t an integral part of our daily lives we find reasons and excuses to postpone and procrastinate doing it because in our minds it’s something we have to start and finish, but when you’re not sure when this work will be over even if you start it right now you tend to postpone it even further.
In these cases, the “practical” (in quotes because we all know postponing something is 100% an emotional thing) thing to do is to think about it as something you do all the time, you’ve done it before and will do it again, it’s not something you like doing but a must either way. And if it’s something you’re completely new to and not sure how to start then take a step forward, try, see how it goes. You see? The emotion here is telling you that you don’t want to deal with this matter now, you’re rejecting it and by doing so giving it more power over you because more emotional burden is created in the process as you blame yourself for not wanting to do it. The amount of relief that will come with not creating this rejection or barrier is worth giving it a try. It’s the same with spiritual or inner work.
A good example of how to deal with this rejection might also be “I can do the dishes now but there are so many of them, this is fine, I don’t have to do ALL of them right this minute, just this plate, just another fork, and move on from there. Maybe stop at some point to do something else and then come back to it later on, while you’re in the middle of something else entirely but could use a break, go wash another plate.
Same thing with inner work. I don’t have to do everything now, I don’t have to start and finish my “goal” for today right now, I can meditate for 5 minutes now while I wait to the meeting, while I drink my tea or water, while I sit here and have million other things to do but everything can wait for just another 5-10 minutes. If you can do this for a few times a day you will start to feel a difference over time, I promise you this much.
It actually doesn’t have to be meditation that you’re doing, it can be other work or other exercises you can do during your day without going “That’s it! I’m doing it now and I finish with it!” just to find yourself procrastinating some more by looking at your phone’s notifications or some more TV, you can do some of it now and some of it later, just do.
So next time you’re faced with a tough “start” of something please remind yourself you should start it now, from there on there’s no knowing what would happen, you might “finish” it you may not, but you can continue later either way.
Thank you for reading.
