A Return to Chaos and the Unknown

“I don’t know where to start.”

“I feel overwhelmed.”

“Nothing seems to fit together anymore.”

“What’s this all for anyway?”

“Umm… no really, WTF am I doing?!”

Ahhhh, the all-too-familiar (and at times paralyzing) signs of being at the start of something new.

I’m having to retrain myself to be with and move through this amorphous inception phase again. After months of wearing “book” blinders while I focused intently on one specific goal, now I can finally set my sights on the many other creative projects I’ve been dying to get to.

But why has it felt so hard? Why have I been resisting and avoiding? Oh, yeah, it’s because I have no idea what I’m doing! How could I? I’m just getting started. The only way to know more is to do more. To take more steps forward, dabble, and play until a picture starts to take shape.

So, I sat myself outside for a couple of hours, opened up a my laptop, and just started typing notes to myself. And I finally started to gain some momentum. Sure, I’m still overwhelmed by all the things I want to do and how I’m going to do it. But, I’m not feeling stuck anymore.

The cool thing about chaos and the unknown at the start of a creative project is that really anything can happen! (Well, anything can always happen in the creative process), but somehow it feels especially juicy at the beginning.  Now I hear myself saying:

“I wonder what could happen next?”

“Yahoo! I get to do it any way I want to!”

“Anything is possible! Rock on!”