Start where you are is the advice from Julia Cameron on writing, and from just about every sage on living. It really isn’t rocket science. Where else would one start?

Figuring out where one is is the challenge. We have to do it ourselves. No one can do it for us, but there is help. Of course I turn to books. I am currently reading (oh, yes, always a number of books going) Catherine Marshall’s To Live Again.

I’m at a point of a new life, just as she was. I’m by myself, completely on my own, for the first time. I want to begin a writing project, something to go to every day, a project to accomplish. I want to write again. Yet, I hesitate. Which one? I had several underway before my husband’s death. I had ideas and desires. Well, that thought makes me chuckle. Does it matter where I begin? Just begin to write, and I’ll be started to where I need to go.

One lesson I learn, again and again, and once again this morning, is that I must begin writing the first thing in the morning. Here I’ve played on the internet, spent a wad ordering on Amazon–dear Lord, the world would end if I had not gotten those pink rain boots, don’t you know– answered emails, and just generally frittered away all the time that is best for me to write.

Change what I can, and blocking out the writing early, refraining from doing anything else before the writing, is one thing I can change. I think when we’re starting where we are, we need to do what we can do.

And now, I’ve written here and all over the place, and am a happy girl. It does not matter so much in the beginning what we write, as it does to form the habit of writing, and in forming that habit, we experience the uplift–we help ourselves, liberate ourselves, find ourselves. Start writing right where you are, and you accomplish all of this.

God bless us all.

“Each forenoon, Monday through Thursday, I began work at nine. By twelve-thirty or one I would be limp, written out for the day.” ~Catherine Marshall, To Live Again.