Beginnings That Hide in the Middle
How To Begin, Part 2
I’m inventing a new word. I do this tentatively, since new words are generally pretty awful. Brexit. Situationship. Jeggings.
I fully support the existence of these words, mind you. As culture evolves so too does its language, and so there comes a point when the old words aren’t enough anymore, as our lives slowly but inevitably outgrow the vocabulary we have to describe them. I passionately defend the evolution of language. I believe new words can and must exist, and that there’s no escaping it, and that even existing words will shift and change, since the meanings of words are not fixed, as Wittgenstein said, but rather they are fluid and defined by how we collectively use them. But just because I believe all that – and I do – doesn’t mean I have to like the word bromance.
So why am I being so dramatic? Why do I think a new word is necessary? And who the hell do I think I am coining it? First of all, calm down. I’m only inventing it for the purposes of this essay, and just because I’m going to use it, doesn’t mean you have to. Also, if you read no further, you’ll never even have to know what the word is, and you can’t say fairer than that.
The new word has to do with beginnings and where they hide. There’s the traditional beginning, of course – Beginning with a big ‘B’, formal by nature – which will happen once and only ever at the start. But then there are the smaller beginnings, the informal ones that we need after we’re interrupted by a phone call, or someone walking in the room when we weren’t expecting it, or, and probably most frequently, whenever our minds have wandered a bit. We may have Begun with a big ‘B’ an hour ago, but is that really an hour’s work? How many times did we have to start again along the way?
This is where I need to get a bit more specific, because it’s not like the idea of beginning again is in any way unique, but that notion – ‘beginning again’ – tends to feel somewhat heavy. Certainly, when we talk of ‘new beginnings,’ we’re generally talking about larger, more significant shifts in our personal circumstances. A new job, or a new relationship, or moving to another area. Similarly, we might ‘start from scratch’ or ‘turn over a new leaf’ or ‘wipe the slate clean’ – all of which are forms of beginning again, but all of which are similarly dramatic, and none of which I personally have the energy for. Most importantly, none of those terms let you carry on with whatever you were doing in the first place – they are big ‘B’ Beginnings, focussing on change over continuity. But what about the smaller beginnings, the ones that hide in the middles?
You can already ‘carry on’ or ‘continue,’ of course, but there’s no interruption implicit in those terms. Just because you’re continuing, doesn’t mean you stopped. ‘Restart’ is a little close to ‘reset,’ both of which carry connotations of going backwards to some prior state, rather than forwards, where progress lies. I have particular needs here. I want a word that acknowledges a setback, and allows us to keep going just as we were beforehand.
There’s an old Irish folk song called Finnegan’s Wake. It’s a song that tells the story of an alcoholic called Tim Finnegan, who falls from a ladder, cracks his skull and dies. His wake gets so rowdy that a mourner hurls a bucket of whiskey across the room. It splashes over Tim Finnegan’s corpse, who wakes with the wonderful line, ‘Thundering Jesus, do you think I’m dead?’
The author James Joyce, borrowing somewhat from the song, later wrote the formidable Finnegans Wake (the same title, less the apostrophe) which, after six hundred pages, famously ends mid-sentence and loops back to the book’s opening words.
More familiar to most of us is the children’s song about an old fella called Michael Finnegan, who grew whiskers on his chinnegan only for the wind to come out and blow them in again. Poor old Michael Finnegan (begin again).
Three Finnegans then, all of whom begin again. And the nature of these beginnings is more rooted in continuity than change – these Finnegans stop, then return to where they were, and they continue – which is exactly what we’ll be discussing here. So, for all my talk of a new word, it might be more accurate to say I’m repurposing an existing one. The word ‘finnegan’ (we’ll go lower-case ‘F’ to distinguish it from the name) already carries the relevant associations, and so, for the purposes of this post, to finnegan is to begin again, not in any dramatic sense, but rather to notice we have stopped, to regroup, and then to keep doing whatever we were doing to begin with.
For me, this idea is rooted in my own writing practice, where failures of focus are common, where I may sit down with the best intentions yet nevertheless find myself distracted by something shiny twenty minutes later. This is a finnegan, and there are two aspects I’d like to unpack, contradictory in nature, which we’ll call The First Thing and The Second Thing.
The First Thing is recognising that stopping and starting again is natural. This taps into an idea that’s reared its head before on this blog: the stuff that seems to get in the way of something is often just a byproduct of engaging with it in the first place. The inherent consequence of trying to achieve anything remotely complex is to be met with obstacles that prevent it.
This is Alan Watts, in his talk Coincidence of Opposites:
[...] any experience that we have through our senses—whether of sound, or of light, or of touch—is a vibration. And a vibration has two aspects: one called “on,” and the other called “off.” [...] For example, sound is not pure sound, it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence. And that’s simply the way things are. Only you must remember that the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests, just as you don’t encounter in life people with fronts but no backs. Just as you don’t encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails. And although the heads and the tails, the fronts and the backs, the positives and the negatives are different, they are, at the same time, one.
And so it goes when you engage with a task. The crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable. The obstacle is part of the process, not a barrier to it – it is evidence of engagement, not of defeat.
So that’s The First Thing – acceptance. Nothing is truly continuous. We’re all of us vibrations, on and then off, stopping then starting. The positive and the negative are one. The unavoidable consequence of attempting to focus is, at some point, to lose focus. It’s just the way things are, so we shouldn’t waste energy fighting that notion. We’d be far better off accepting it.
But The Second Thing, contradictory in a way I make absolutely no apologies for, is that we should not accept it. We should seek to do one thing at a time, to give it our full attention, and to minimise that which distracts us.
The world of social psychology gives us the term ‘time affluence’ – the study of how much free time people feel like they have. The modern-day narrative is about how we’re all busier than ever, but time-use research does study this beyond mere generalities. There’s nuance here – class, gender, parental status, and what actually counts as ‘leisure’ time – but the trend is that most modern societies increasingly gained leisure time from the 1960s all the way through to the mid-2000s, at which point it levelled off, where it has remained without decline ever since. Individually – who can say? – you may very well be busier than ever. But collectively, we really aren’t. We’re about as busy as we ever were. That may not seem like the ‘hot take’ you’re looking for, but it’s actually a more interesting state of affairs because the question changes from, ‘Why are we all so busy?’ to, ‘Why do we feel so busy?’
One answer can be found in a wonderful term coined by author and journalist Brigid Schulte: time confetti. Time confetti relates to the increasingly disjointed way in which we spend our free time. We may have plenty of spare minutes, but the more splintered and disconnected they are, the more meaningless they become. How easily our spare minutes fill with a YouTube video, the checking of email, a scroll on social media. How rare to combine those minutes into a solid hour of doing something with intention. We’re all thread and no cloth, our time too fragmented to be meaningful. All of which is to say that too many stop-starts – too many finnegans – will scatter our time to the wind. Spending an hour at work is not necessarily the same thing as actually working for an hour. Indeed, it’s surprising how often they are separate activities.
For some of us, it’s difficult to know when we’ve stopped doing the thing we intended to. It’s tricky to identify the precise moment that led us away from the task at hand. All we can say for sure is that fifteen minutes ago we were writing and now we’re sat there, phone in hand, having fallen yet again into the bottomless well of never-ending online content. But if we think, we can trace it back. We picked up our phone because we wanted to check our bank balance, which we felt compelled to do because someone in an email said an invoice had been paid. We checked our email because we hit a snag on our primary task, and so we wanted a way of avoiding it that would, on some level, allow us to claim we really were still working, your honour. We followed the path of least resistance and now the algorithm is working its magic, feeding us content we do not need but cannot hope to resist.
Buddhist scriptures speak of Mara – a demon who tricks people into giving up, or doing the thing they shouldn’t. Mara is cunning, difficult to spot, and most go about their lives oblivious to his existence, but Buddha would often say, ‘Mara, I see you.’ Because to see the demon – to see the delusion – is to take away its power. It’s not easy. It requires the ability to see and understand ourselves with real clarity. Buddhists have a word for this self-monitoring – sampajañña. English translations differ on exactly what it means, but it’s something like ‘clear comprehension’ or ‘full awareness.’ It’s a simple idea but it’s the work of a lifetime.
Motivations are subtle, as Buddhist scholar Joseph Goldstein says. To illustrate the point, he tells the simple story of the time he gave a piece of fruit to a young beggar in India. The beggar took the fruit and walked away, without so much as a nod, barely acknowledging him at all, and Goldstein found himself affected by this – after all, a little thanks wouldn’t go amiss. That was interesting to Goldstein. He had thought his motivation was solely to help the beggar, but if that were true then the only thing that should have mattered was the act of giving the fruit, and the beggar’s response should have been irrelevant. His motivation, he reflected, was more elusive than pure charity – it involved himself more than he had previously understood.
Most of us aren’t even looking for our own motivations, let alone seeking to understand them. Of course we have to check our emails – that’s our job. But if we slow down and look a little closer, we may see the truth of it: we didn’t really think it was important to check our email, rather we were struggling with the task we were doing prior. Later, we’ll tell ourselves the story of how our day was simply too busy to make progress on the difficult task, when in fact we were secretly looking for reasons to avoid it. Mara tricked us, and we were deceived. For me, even the act of writing this post – I notice as I sit here – is a distraction from another piece of writing I should be prioritising. Motivations are subtle.
One tiny, bad decision is all it takes to trigger the Rube Goldberg machine, sending the marble of our attention spiralling into increasingly impressive detours. So the goal is to watch that marble, to keep an eye on ourselves, to pay attention to our inclination to stop or do something else, and to notice exactly how much discomfort triggers that impulse. All of which ultimately means increasing our tolerance for staying with a problem. In the wonderful book Ron Carlson Writes a Story, Carlson takes one of his own short stories and breaks down the process he went through to write it, part of which involves him dealing with his own impulses to stop. This is him:
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING a writer can do after completing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence or to go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen. But. It’s this simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room.
I think most writers will recognise the temptation to ‘leave the room,’ and this represents the other side of the problem: not only will we find an easier route when faced with discomfort, but if we actually succeed in making any progress at all, we believe we’ve earned a break. We are hopeless. But I like Carlson’s advice, although the precise framing is a little dated today. Carlson was writing this at a time when the TV was the main source of distraction, and notice how it’s at least in another room. Ron Carlson Writes a Story was released in 2007, the same year as the first iPhone, at a time when average home internet speeds were around 3 Mbps, but the philosophy holds, and I like it just the same: the writer is the person who stays in the room. Or, as Austin Kleon put it more recently: Open the document, stay in the document.
Ok. So let’s say we’re paying closer attention to our own patterns of thought and action – we’re cultivating our sampajañña, learning how to see Mara, looking out for finnegans. That’s all great, but how do we actually begin again? How do we make progress on the thing we’re struggling with and secretly avoiding? Here I turn to the work of Dr. Timothy Pychyl, a psychologist who specialised in procrastination, and whose work I’ve referenced here before. His advice to begin a task you’ve been putting off works just as well for returning to a task you left behind, and it’s this: find the smallest way to begin. You don’t have to begin the big daunting document you’ve promised, but you can find the email that outlines what’s required. And so the task is not ‘write the big daunting document,’ but rather, ‘find the relevant email.’ Well, we can certainly do that. And once we’ve found it, we may as well read it, and once we’ve read it, we may as well think about it, and since we’re thinking about it, we may as well write those thoughts down, and so on.
I’m unsure if Pychyl named this concept, but I’ve started thinking of this as the Smallest Identifiable (unit of) Progress. Yes, I’ve given it caps, and I’m going to cautiously abbreviate it too – in a way that seems a little bit corporate and makes me feel slightly nauseous – but you see, the Smallest Identifiable Progress is a SIP, which seems fitting. We’re not downing the whole thing. It’s a tiny, little slurp of a tea too hot to gulp.
Ron Carlson says two things will help you stay in the room: ‘staying specific and not stopping.’ So it goes with a sip. A sip, too, must be specific, but crucially it must never, ever be difficult. Whenever I find myself struggling, the goal is not to make the work good, but to make progress easy – because the easier progress becomes, the better the work will be. This is about prioritising momentum over quality, and minimising the friction that causes me to stop, because the ultimate goal of learning to spot finnegans is counterintuitive – it’s to see as few of them as possible. I don’t want to stop, nor do I want to be faced with beginning again. I just want to keep going.
It’s the consistency of the small action that gets us through, not the drama of the larger one. The pomp and ceremony of a wedding day is not what makes a relationship – it’s smaller, more specific kindnesses that will sustain it. The grand declaration you’re writing a novel might give you enough incentive to blast through the opening two chapters, but it won’t get you through the agony of noticing the plot holes and motivational flaws once you’re twenty thousand words in.
Everything worthwhile is made from something smaller, so the goal becomes – just for the moment – focussing on the small thing, not the large; the bricks and not the house. I can’t really write a book – that’s absurd. But I can write one sentence and then another, and I can notice the impulse to stop but continue anyway. I can stay in the room. A piece of writing is only ever the consequence of a thousand tiny decisions, all stacked up together. And even when I stray – and I will – that’s not a setback, that’s just a finnegan. That’s an on-off, a stop-start, a natural part of the process. It’s the bucket of whiskey hurled at my corpse, the invitation to wake up and begin again.
Thundering Jesus, do you think I’m dead?
(You’ve been reading How To Begin, Part 2. Here’s How To Begin, Part 1.)