Start Close In
Once, when he was asked how he navigates a big writing project and avoids that kind of paralysis that can come when a task feels impossibly large, the poet David Whyte said, “I have a poem that literally works with that called Start Close In. “Start close in,” goes the poem, “don’t take the second step / or the third, / start with the first thing / close in … Start with the ground you know, / the pale ground beneath your feet … Start right now / take a small step you can call your own … Start close in, / don’t take the second step / or the third, / start with the first thing / close in.”
Starting close in, with a small or first thing—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Ritual is the Cab
The dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp begins each day with the same morning ritual: she wakes up at 5:30, puts on workout clothes, walks outside her New York City home, hails a taxi, and asks the driver to take her to a gym, where she works out for two hours. The ritual is not the two-hour workout, Tharp writes in The Creative Habit. “The ritual is the cab.” When the alarm goes off each morning, instead of thinking ahead about whether or not her tired body can possibly get through a two-hour workout, she starts closer in: just get to the cab. Getting in the cab is, for Tharp, what James Clear calls a “gateway habit.” In Atomic Habits, Clear shows how just about everything can be broken down down to a gateway habit. Say you want to run a marathon. That can be broken down to running a 5K, then down to walking ten thousand steps, then to walking for ten minutes, then to putting on your running shoes. “Your goal might be to run a marathon, but your gateway habit is to put on your running shoes…The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved…You have to standardize before you can optimize.” You have to take the first step before you can take the second or the third.
Sounding Like Bruce Comes Later
To prepare to play Bruce Springsteen in the upcoming movie Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, actor Jeremy Allen White took singing lessons. A lifelong fan of Springsteen’s music, Jeremy joked that his reverence for the music made him so anxious about getting the voice right, he didn’t need his usual morning cup of coffee in the lead-up to filming—he’d wake up earlier than ever, wide awake, buzzing with nerves. When he first started working with his vocal coach, Jeremy said, “My focus was on these kind of external ideas. My focus was so much on, ‘how do I sound more like Bruce Springsteen? I just need to sound more like Bruce Springsteen.’ I was concerning myself in the beginning with all the wrong things.” In the beginning, he was concerning himself not with first things, but second or third things. “And my vocal coach said to me, ‘Slow it down, slow it down. Sounding like Bruce comes later. For now, focus on what kind of story you are telling, the songs you are singing, and what they mean to you, Jeremy—let’s start there.’” Starting closer in, starting with the ground he knew—himself and what Springsteen’s songs had meant to him throughout his life—”that’s where I found my comfort,” Jeremy said. “By starting on the inside and then going out.” (”Don’t follow someone else’s heroics,” Whyte writes in another stanza, “start close in.”)
Immobilized By The Hugeness Of The Task Ahead
When she’s stuck or feeling overwhelmed by a big project, the writer Anne Lamott likes to think of a story “that over and over helps me get a grip.” When her brother was ten years old, he was stuck on a school project for which he had to write a report on birds. “He was at the kitchen table close to tears,” Lamott writes in Bird by Bird, “surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”
Narrow It Down. Narrow It Down. Narrow It Down
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a young girl is assigned to write a five-hundred-word essay about any topic. She chose to write about the United States. Her teacher—the book’s protagonist, the wise Phaedrus—suggested she narrow it down to Bozeman, Montana. When the due date arrived, she didn’t have a single word written. “She just couldn’t think of anything to say,” the narrator says. “Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere.” Phaedrus gave her an extension. But this time, Phaedrus said, “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” Again, when the due date came, she had nothing. “Narrow it down,” Phaedrus said, “to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.” She went to the hamburger stand across the street from the Opera House. She started writing about the upper left-hand brick and then the brick next to it and the one next to that. “It all started to come and I couldn’t stop,” she told Phaedrus the next day when she handed in a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the Main Street in Bozeman, Montana.
Like Driving A Car At Night
Asked while in the early stages of a project if he knew how it was going to end, the novelist E.L. Doctorow said that not even in the late stages of a project does he know how it’s going to end. “It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” A big project, task, workout, assignment, goal, day—whatever it is: don’t worry about the second step or the third. Start with the first. Start with the ground beneath your feet. Start with one bird or brick. Start close in. You can make the whole trip that way.