The Terrifying and Beautiful Act of Starting Over

Have you ever started over?

By that I mean, have you ever transferred schools and lost all of your credits, left a long relationship you thought was going to last forever, scratched a business or a project after years of your life and thousands of dollars invested?

If you have, you know how truly terrifying staring over can feel.

Over the course of my 37 years on this planet, I’ve had the opportunity to start over numerous times, and each new ‘starting over’ opportunity brought with it a healthy amount of fear—as well as pure excitement.

The first memory I have of starting over was when I transferred between my freshman and sophomore year of college. You see, I had spent my first year fairly close to where I grew up, with people I had gone to high school with, heavily scholar-shipped, and pretty much just ‘playing it safe’.

Midway through that first year, I realized that in order to really pursue my dream career—the one I had known and wanted since I was 14 years old—I would need to go to the big, scary, expensive, and far-away University of Illinois.

A similar thing happened to me my senior year of college.

I had spent the previous 3 years learning how to be a product designer and loving nearly every minute of it. Then, this unexpected passion for making music began stealing my attention. I started to feel like now was the time to give music a shot as a career.

So again, I faced that familiar feeling of starting over.

I secured a role playing music at a couple of summer camps, arranged to record a cd, and planned a move to Nashville.

Just like that. I was starting over.

Most recently, I’d come to a place artistically where I felt the need to leave Nashville in order to make the music I wanted to make. I had been writing and recording music in virtually the same way, in the same location, for the entirety of my career, and I was bored.

I wanted to feel like I did when I first moved to Nashville.

Like when I first got to the U of I.

Like anything was possible and there was nothing to compare and no safety net (cue: Nothing Left to Lose by Mat Kearney). So what did I do? I began making arrangements to spend a few months in Los Angeles—to start over yet again musically and see what inspiration I could find in an unfamiliar place.

It’s amazing what happens when we start making decisions.

Something happens to us when we set an intent on a new course.

All the other options fall away, and all of a sudden we have new decisions to make, but the cool thing is- they are all in line with this new path we are walking down!

And before you know it, you’re actually DOING the thing you set out to do!

Something I’ve learned in the last couple years is that the antidote to fear isn’t safety, but courage. So if I’m afraid of something, shrinking back and not making a decision doesn’t make me less afraid.

It’s only when we step out and take courageous action that fear begins to fade away.

The beautiful thing is: that courageous thing doesn’t even have to lead me to the place I thought it was going to go, because it ultimately will lead to the next decision and the next after that. Each of these steps becomes absolutely indispensable in our journeys, and will ultimately sweep us up in an adventure we never would have entered by playing it safe.

I’ve definitely tried playing it safe in my life.

especially as I’ve gotten older and have accumulated more and gotten accustomed to a certain lifestyle and begun to expect certain things out of life.

I can’t think of a bigger enemy to courage than comfort.

Most people will not decide to make a change in their life until the pain of NOT making that decision is too much to endure.

Maybe I have a lower pain threshold than most, and for that, I’m thankful.

What I do know is that when we’re at a crossroads in life, whether creatively or otherwise, we’d be wise to take courage from the fact that we can’t mess it up!

Even if you decide you’re going to move to Omaha to be a pro surfer, the beautiful thing is—the sheer fact that you are deciding to DO something will open up a whole new world (cue: Aladdin soundtrack) that will get you closer to where you ultimately were meant to be.