A new chapter. A blank page. A fresh start.

I love all the promise of a new beginning. The allure of it. All the potential that lays ahead of how we might be different, of how we might do things differently. Many of us do – it’s why we set new year’s intentions, or buy new workout programs, or plan to become a whole new person starting Monday. Each of these seem to offer an enticing opportunity to start over, to start fresh, to finally be freed from our past flawed selves and all their messiness. Except that it never really does work that way. Fresh starts soon bleed into the quotidian; the magic of the new year lessens. The blank page becomes marked and imperfect. We soon lose the momentum of the moment and fall back into old, familiar patterns until such time that we grow uncomfortable enough to go searching, once again, for a new catalyst for change, hoping it might finally be the one that sticks.

Or am I just speaking from experience?

The thing is, I believe in fresh starts. In the magic of new beginnings. I get excited by planning, and making a new wellness or writing schedule, or setting intentions and habit-stacking rituals. I’m inspired by dreaming up new goals and developing neat, strategic processes to achieve them. The part of me that craves new beginnings is the same part of me that loves when fall arrives and tied to it the memory of organizing new schoolbooks for the year ahead. But with all this enchantment I have to wonder why so often the potential of a fresh start fizzles out; why goals are discarded and left unaccomplished; why the desire for change isn’t enough to create it. I know many others struggle with this too (there is, after all, an entire industry dedicated to it) and I have a sneaky suspicion that many of us already know the answer. The reality is change is hard. And as much as I’d like to believe that a well-organized planner is enough in and of itself to create it, I know it’s not.

So, while the answer for how to change your life can’t be neatly summed up in a video, or a podcast, or a ten-step how-to article, what does hold water is the idea that in order to create change, our reason for it must be greater than our resistance against it. Against the discomfort of it. Against the challenges we will face. Against the sheer propulsion required. And it’s also true that we’re more likely to create lasting change when we are consistent in our practice (whatever that may be), even if the output isn’t perfect. For me, it’s this latter part that often stops me in my tracks, gets me stuck – the idea that it won’t be perfect. That these words won’t be absolute, that this writing won’t arrive fully formed and fleshed out on the page, that it won’t meet expectations (my own or my imagined reader’s). And worse, that these imperfections, these shortcomings, will be visible to others.  But I know, intuitively, that this is what keeps me on stuck on page one. This is what makes work go unpublished. It’s what keeps plans on paper, unactioned. It’s what makes another fresh start necessary – each time the promise that this time, it will be different.

Well, this time, it has to be different.

This change is the culmination of all others. Of all the things I’ve learned. Of all that’s worked and hasn’t worked. Of all that came before. Because a fresh start is a nice idea (a magical one, really), but it never is entirely new. It is never cleanly divorced from the past. Instead, it’s informed by it. And while the past may shape who we are, the trick is not to get trapped in it. To instead keep only what serves you and release the rest. To let it go, including all those previously abandoned fresh starts. And when you find yourself once again off track, or not consistent, or god forbid imperfect, to not abandon the practice but to simply begin again.

So here I start. Right now, with this blog post. And what would have stopped me from publishing this before is how achingly imperfect it is. But a folder full of nearly complete works and a half-finished manuscript won’t get me where I want to go. So instead, I’ll start over, however imperfectly. And this change will be different because this time I am different. Because my reason for it is now greater than my resistance to it. This little one nestled beside me has made it so. Nothing else even compares. Nothing else can ever matter as much. So why waste any more time not putting my work out there for fear it will be imperfect, or not well received, or not fully realised. It may be all those things, but none of them are what I need to remain attached to.

It’s time for a new chapter. It’s time to begin again.