Where to start

This poem offers a simple practice for navigating change.

Rather than asking us to know the entire path ahead, it suggests beginning with what is already available: our present circumstances, an honest sense of where we hope to go, and one small step in that direction.

Sometimes the simplest guidance is also the most enduring.

I sometimes smile when I reread this one.

Many of my poems wrestle with uncertainty, identity, purpose, or transformation. This one does none of that. It simply offers the practice I have returned to more often than perhaps any other.

When life feels overwhelming, I have a tendency to think too far ahead. I want to understand the whole journey before taking the next step. More often than not, that only leaves me feeling stuck.

This poem reminds me that clarity rarely arrives all at once.

It emerges through movement.

• There is something deeply reassuring about beginning exactly where we are.
• Not where we wish we were.
• Not where we think we should be.

Just here:

Feeling into the direction that seems most alive.

Taking one step.

And repeat.