Well, this chapter is very close to my heart and has perhaps been one of the most often referred to chapters of the entire book. The chapter title “beginning again” comes from that perfect line from Saint Benedict, “Always we begin again.”
I have loved the “beginning again” phrase so much that I even borrowed it as the tagline for my blog because it’s pretty much the best advice I’ve ever heard, words to live by if you ask me. Beginning again is about offering ourselves the grace we have never been able to give ourselves. Realizing, maybe for the first time, that compassion will get us so much farther than condemnation.
There are so many areas of life where we need a new day, a fresh start, another chance. With our loved ones, of course. When we do life in close proximity to children and partners and family members, we often have to ask for another try. We mess up. We say something we shouldn’t have like. We go to crazy town. We take the wrong tact. We go at it hostilely. We hit someone right where it hurts, and we know it.
We often need to begin again in our pursuits—creative pursuits, vocational pursuits, professional pursuits, health pursuits—too. Sunday night I led a writing group meet up, and I’m still thinking about the group, still energized by these people who are quietly taking risks, honing their craft, finding their voice, getting stuck, reaching out, beginning again. All of this in obscurity; all of this because they believe something needs to be put out into the world through their hands. To me, this is no small thing.
I listened to Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast, “Magic Lessons” (which I highly recommend) last week and in one of the episodes she said, “Any talent that we have but do not use becomes a burden.” How many of us have carried that burden — of something unspoken that is burning a hole in our soul just waiting to be expressed?
Maybe we’ve tried, dabbled a bit, and then we’ve gotten stuck or sidelined or confused or tired. Maybe we fell into the trap of believing everyone else was more prepared, more talented, more able . . . and that belief has silenced us.
Maybe we’ve let barriers creep up and creep into our work. Barriers like fear or worry over what others will think. And we’ve let those barriers bench us.
What would it be like for you to begin again? What would it be like for me to begin again?
I don’t always know what to do next, which direction to go, where to put my energy. Sometimes I can overcomplicate things, and the best thing I can do is simply begin again. Do the next thing, take one small step, and trust that my one step is met with a thousand steps of God’s grace.
Today, as I reflect on chapter 4 of Breathing Room, I’m reminded that life is full of fear, paralysis, worry. We can’t avoid negative feelings. But we can decide to begin again. We can decide to open ourselves back up to possibility. We can decide to let God in the tiniest bit . . . into the paralyzing places in our work, parenting, marriage, home.
Few things are more powerful than beginning again. The brain vultures would have us believe that once we’ve messed up, then we’ve ruined any chance of recovery. This is a lie to trap us in the darkness. There is always a new grace being offered to us. Always. The trick is to learn to offer it to ourselves.
“Can I offer myself what God has already offered me: another chance? And another? And another? Can I let go of my own fear long enough to let some air into the room? Can I loosen the noose of self-contempt and receive the grace of starting over? Can I see that moving forward, however imperfectly, is so much braver than staying stuck?”
What does beginning again mean to you today?
