Start with Yourself: Get Moving

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

–Lao Tzu

 

 This post is the sixth of a series called “Start with Yourself,” a how-to guide to living like a hero on your quest to change the world. You don’t have to have read the others to understand this one, but if you like it, you might want to read the call to adventure, why we refuse the call,  how to say yes, how to begin and how to get past the guardian. Sign up in the box to the right to be sure not to miss a thing 🙂

So you’re here, ready to change the world. 

Now what?

You’ve gotten past the threshold guardian, nothing’s standing in your way — you’re FREE!  Free to….. free to….. ready to …..to…. to…. do what, exactly?

Well – anything.  Anything, that is, except nothing.

The Overwhelm & Despair of an Overwhelmingly Beautiful, Audacious Vision

 

Even if you have a vision of what you want the world to look like, and where you want to go, a funny thing sometimes happens after you get past your first obstacles and see that accomplishing the dream you’ve dreamed means doing… something.

When you have a dream that is so audacious, so unreasonable, and so incomprehensible to everyone (maybe even yourself), then there will come a moment when you will stand at the edge of the road, staring down all that distance to travel.

The distance between the beautiful vision you’re holding and where you are can be terrifying.    

Is it even possible to make it there? Is there a path that exists? If not, do you have what it takes to make one? Can you go the distance?

This is the point when a lot of people just give up — the first time we are faced with no excuses, just a load of work that needs to be done.  With the realization that the path we need to walk will be ours to make.

This moment, when it hits us, is crucial.

Conquer Overwhelm with Imagination

 

When Lao Tzu said “A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step,” I don’t think he was trying to be cute.  I think he was describing the act of visualizing a completable task. One step = Pick up foot.  Move forward. Place on ground.  Shift weight. Pick up other foot. (Repeat.)

How do you walk a journey of 1,000 miles? Just like that.

if you can’t imagine yourself doing it, then yes, it’s true, you can’t.  But NOT because you are incapable – simply because imagination is the first step to completing any action.  If you can’t imagine it, it might mean you don’t know enough.  Or you may be trying to imagine the completion of a giant sequence of many smaller steps without the steps themselves.  Could you imagine completing a marathon without knowing how to move one foot in front of the other?

Try it. 

All I can imagine is trying to will my body forward with the sheer force of my mind – and face planting into the cement.

So if you don’t know anything, the first step is to learn enough to be dangerous – and then act on that knowledge.

A single, coherent chunk that you can imagine yourself doing in the real world.  It has to have a clear completion. A step is just that – your foot moves from one place to another.  Done.

It has to be doable in less than a day. Maybe less than an hour, or a minute.  Because we don’t just DO an entire project… we do it step by step.  Little action by little action.

This is how inertia begins.

 

Movement is the unit of measurement.

 

 In the beginning, all that matters is movement – getting inertia on our side.  In the beginning, movement is the unit of measurement.  Not how far we have moved – just whether or not we moved at all.

That is our only goal in the beginning get. moving.

Not to get where we’re going.  Not to make Significant and Impressive Progress. 

Just to be in a every so slightly different position that we are now.

A snails pace, a glacial pace, it doesn’t matter how slow or small or insignificant – what matters is that get moving, and stay moving.

I’ll say it again: movement is the unit of measurement.  It’s binary.  Moved? Success! Didn’t move? Try a smaller step. Repeat.

On the journey all sorts of magic can happen if we let it…but first we have to get moving.

The Impossible Slowness of Beginning….

 

So you imagine your first step, and take it! You add another, and a couple more, and you’re moving.

But then, just as you are starting to move ever so slowly, up comes the next big wall: a nasty little voice in your head will say, “sure, I did these tiny things…..but at this rate, I will never get there.”

Hearing this nasty inner voice, you might count what it cost, in effort, time, and emotional energy to take those first steps…. and then start to make calculations.  This thought process might trigger a wave of despair, because at some level, you will know that little voice is right.

And it is: that voice in your head is scary because it’s true.  But not in the way that you think. 

No, you will not get there at this rate.  But you won’t be going at this rate forever.

Conquer Despair with Faith

 

How long did it take you to take your first step?  I mean that quite literally, as in when you were a baby.  How long did that take? 8 months, nine months, a year? If we ballpark a mile at about 2000 steps, going at that rate it would take 250,000 months, or over 20,833 years to walk a thousand miles.  That’s hundreds of times the average human life time – impossible!

Yet the average human being will walk tens of thousands of miles in their lifetime.

By moving we build our skill.  By moving we will increase our speed. And perhaps we will even uncover hidden allies, secret passageways, or a hovercraft or two.

The place you are going is so far beyond what you can see yourself doing now, because your skills, abilities, and resources are going to change.  Stick with this – really, do – and not only will you make progress, but the journey will change and teach you.  You don’t have to know how you will walk 1000 miles.  You just have begin to become a semi-capable walker.

One step at a time.

Bonus points: Share how you got moving in the comments below! 🙂