How to Get Through The Not-So-Graceful Beginning

During a stretch of the gets-dark-so-early winter, my husband and I tried each weekend to make chicken tikka masala, something we love to order at Indian restaurants but had never made at home.

Photo Credit: Cristian Bortes, Creative Commons

In the process, I recognized an impulse in myself that pipes up whenever I try (or even ponder trying) something new.

It was dressed this way in our attempts at masala:

“Do we even have the right recipe? So ‘garam masala’ is a powder? Oh…the chicken has to marinate? Ok, this takes a lot of dishes. Really, eating at the Indian restaurant only costs about twenty bucks. We’d be eating sooner if we just picked it up.”

This monologue reveals my distaste for the unwieldy, unpredictable fits and starts that accompany the first stages of any good work, be it a recipe or something slightly more significant.

As someone who likes efficiency,

(and to be quite honest, likes appearing to be smooth and already adept at various activities), those bumbling steps at the beginning can make a task seem insurmountable and un-worth it to me.

It feels like all the hurdles meant for a 400-meter race are lined up base to base and squeezed together in only the first fifteen meters of track.

To try to get over one hurdle is to accidentally knock three down is to get tangled in between them while you’re setting them back up (is this even how you set them up?) is to have to step backward and forward and into your neighbor’s lane all at the same time.

The inelegant redirection and circling back around it takes to get something going is frustrating, but here’s what I’m often discouraged and then encouraged to remember:

You can’t get to the good work until you do the bumbling around.

Those awkward and fidgety first attempts that masquerade as wastes of time are actually the only way to make it to the work that matters.

Meaningful moments of process settle on us after a thousand tiny other moments that felt like what-not-to-dos. The rough drafts and first rounds and dress rehearsals I wish I could fast-forward through to arrive at a place where I’m actually doing something actually are the doing something.

Sometimes there is simply no graceful way to begin.

Before the ritual of productive routine and the satisfaction of honed discipline have taken shape, you’re just fumbling over crowded hurdles wondering if adding twice as much of whatever tandoori is as the recipe calls for was a good idea. Effective and hitting-your-stride and energizing come after and only after clunky and feels-like-amateur-hour and cumbersome.

I’m far too often daunted by the clumsy start of things.

Whatever the work of our days looks like, at the beginning of a new season, a new project, or sometimes just at the beginning of a new morning, we have to be willing to stumble along uneven steps before our work feels fruitful.

I want to stop trying or expecting to embody some kind of automatic, polished gracefulness in my beginnings, and instead practice knowing that there is grace for my beginnings, chicken-tikka-masala-related or otherwise.

How to Get Through The Not-So-Graceful Beginning is a post from: Storyline Blog