Beginnings can be tricky. If you’re not careful, you can set the wrong tone or say the wrong thing or pop your head into the wrong conversation. You know what I mean. Remember your beginnings.
Remember the first dates and the terrifying excitement of a fresh start. The anticipation of some unknown future. A chance to discover someone and for them to discover you.
Remember the first steps. They are just as fragile for the half-teetering, half-standing baby as they are for the half-confident, half-horrified freshman.
Remember the first words, spoken with from-the-bottom-of-the-soul confidence in a ball of confused baby-speak or in that first-whispered “I love you” from mother to newborn.
Remember the blazing spark of that first touch. Remember the paralyzing power and beauty of a symphony’s first note. Remember the first bright star that peeks through the clear and darkening twilight.
Remember your beginnings.
There are small beginnings and big beginnings. There are some you want back and some you couldn’t do the same way ever again no matter how much, how deeply you want to.
Each of them is an opportunity.
What awaits those tentative steps in the living room? Or in the quad? Where do the baby’s words come from? Or the mother’s love? A place distant from doubt and inability and uncertainty, that’s for certain. What of the spark, the music or the light of the star? Anything can happen. The love and the music can soar.
But only if you let it. You see, life is born from courage. Courage from surrender.
Each beginning is an invitation.
An open door is waiting for you. A sculpture is waiting to be found and carved. A plane that you can jump out of. A book to be written. An adventure to be had and to be shared.
But only if you let it.
You must let it. You were created for this. Courage is born in and through and because of you. Start something! Every now is a beginning waiting to happen. Take the adventure. Write the book. Let the song of your life play and dance your heart out.
You will never forget what you begin today.