Starting

Seeing as it’s the start of a new year, I decided I’d write about starting.

17 days into 2015 and I have achieved: nothing, some half written songs, a book that’s about one billionth of the way written. The only thing I have managed to finish entirely at this stage has been breakfast and lunch. I have a good feeling dinner will follow suit.

Throughout 2014 I, like so many others, didn’t really do anything I intended on doing. I thought about lots of things and, sometimes, started a lot of things. I told myself that this year I would finish those things, but so far I’ve been kind enough to offer all of my responsibilities as gifts to my future self. My future self is sure to be a great guy, there’s so much he’s going to do. My present self on the other hand…

I’m something of a generalist. I’m kind of good at a lot of things, but not very good at any one thing in particular. I have had an extremely unsuccessful and short lived surfing career, which amounted to about 4 free t-shirts, a couple of pairs of horrifically ugly boardshorts, a strange foam board which bordered on being unrideable, and a rather odd board cover which resembles a misshapen Mardi-Gras float. I’ve been playing guitar for about ten years and recently started writing songs, and I’m hoping that my career as a musician can be somewhat more profitable than the aforementioned surfing venture, and I will not be accepting Mardi-Gras inspired guitar cases in exchange for gigs. I also entertain the idea of establishing myself as a writer, which is why you have the fortune/misfortune of being introduced to my train of thought. A train, I might add, which is subject to frequent delays, chewing gum sticking to your shoes and strange grown men making eye contact with you while they piss in an empty longneck at the station.

This strange self-evaluation has brought me to something of a conclusion, although maybe it’s more of an excuse, a conclusion that suits me. My conclusion is this: perhaps starting is more important than finishing. Starting is what separates those who do interesting things and have interesting stories from those who are in their 40’s before they realise that they’ve done nothing with their life. Starting is absolutely necessary if you intend on finishing something, although finishing is not essential to starting. If nothing else, starting something will give you something to look back on when future you has run out of interesting things to do (which hopefully never happens). Maybe one day when I’m old and tired and drunk I’ll dig out the strange Mardi-Gras inspired board cover and tell my grandkids some exaggerated story about how cool I was, but hopefully I’ll have more stories to add to my “cool grandad” résumé by then.

Maybe nobody will remember you for starting something, but at least you’ll have something to remember yourself by.

(Hey look I finished this article, that’ll look good on my next self evaluation!)

-Daniel Foster

#starting