Permission to Start NOW!

When I started this blog, my plan was to start, and to continue this year, 2012, by posting a new Permission each month.  You can read, or perhaps re-read, about my plan here, in my very first post:
http://mollybluedawn.blogspot.com/2011/10/welcome-to-world-of-wishbringer.html

I was supposed to start in January.  I didn’t start in January.  So now, I am starting now.

I have so many plans, piles of plans which have piled up until the deepest plans are buried and I can’t even find them.  When I am reminded, sometimes painfully, sometimes guiltilly, sometimes wistfully, of a long-neglected plan, I want to start on it right away, and then I realize all the reasons why this might not be the right time.  It might be too early.  It might be too late.  I might need to get some other things done first, like read every e-mail, wash every dish, put away all my laundry, go pick up all those things at the store, and while I’m out I’d better stop at that other place I need to go and take care of some business, and now I see that my tank is almost empty, so I’ll need to stop and take care of that, and by that time it will be time for lunch, and what was that other thing?  I have forgotten it again.

So now, rather than feeling sad or guilty or too busy or not in the right mood, I am going to start now.  I am going to start now while it is still now, and not wait for the right time to decide that there is such a thing as now.  No matter how many reasons I can find why now might not be the right time, I’m just going to do it now anyway, because now is the only now I have.  

I know that now is already later than it ought to be.  Since I can’t go back and fix that, I will just start from now and go forward as best I can.  I know that now is a time when I might be interrupted and not be able to finish what I have started, and I might have to come back to it at a later now, but just in case there is never a now when that won’t be even truer than it is right now, I am starting now.

So now, I give you Permission To Start Now!  

Is there a book you have been meaning to read?  Pick it up and start reading, even if you have to put the bookmark in before you even finish the first page.  Is there a book you have been meaning to write?  Find a pen and paper or a typewriter or a computer or a voice recorder and get some words to come out of your mind and into the world, even if they will turn out not to be the right words, and you will have to change them all later, when you have found out what you are actually writing about - you will find that out by having written it.  

Is there a recipe you have been meaning to try?  Look it up and write down the ingredients on a scrap of paper right now, and put it in your wallet so that when you get to the grocery store, you will remember what you need to buy so that you can make it.  

Is there a huge pile of items in your home which you haven’t really used for a long time, and which  you don’t necessarily need to keep anymore, and which might be hiding actually useful and important items from you by being so piled up?  Pick up one of those items, just one, right now.  Examine it, and decide whether to keep it or to give it up.  If you decide to keep it, you must also decide where it belongs and put it away in its proper place right now.  If you decide to give it up, find a bag and put the item in the bag and put the bag by the door so that when you have repeated this procedure once a day for a month, examining just one item each day, you will have a month’s worth of no-longer-useful-to-you items in the bag by the door and can take that bag out of your home and donate it to a thrift store, or have a friend look through it and help you decide which friends of yours should become the happy new owners of which now-useful-to-them items.

What do you feel most like doing right now, whether it makes any sense or not?  Do you feel like bursting into song, like doing a silly little dance, like screaming, like laughing, like running around in circles until you fall over, like taking a bath, like taking a nap?  If it won’t cause anyone any harm to do that nonsensical thing right now, then do it!  Right now!  Is there a bird singing outside your window, a sunbeam making motes of dust sparkle in the air, the smell of someone baking or having a barbecue next door?  Can you give yourself a moment to hear it, to see it, to smell it, to relish it and revel in it right now?  

Every moment is a now which might be the home of some simple, silly joy, and the spaces between big, busy moments in our lives can be filled with these small, joyful moments, if we allow ourselves to have enough now for what we feel like experiencing instead of always what we are supposed to be doing, or are feeling bad about failing to have done.  Now only takes a moment of your time, and it gives you a moment of time spent really being and noticing and experiencing and living.   And when one moment of now leads to another, there’s no telling what might happen now!  

Living in the Now,

Wishbringer Molly Blue Dawn, High Priestess of Serendipity