🚦 TREE 276: Just f***ing start, 1 of 3

It’s the key to everything, including finishing.

Four months ago I began publishing my newsletter, The Road 2 Elsewhere, about how travel transforms lives. But before I could launch that, I had to face the most difficult thing for any creative: actually starting the work.

Clues for how I did that coming right up.

—Peter Moore

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One.

I spent my lifetime preparing to write the manuscript.

Actually, I spent a lifetime talking about writing the manuscript. It was always an idea, something I would tackle one day. And so, a lifetime sped by. There was oatmeal to spoon into tiny mouths, and tantrums to tame. And there were various bosses to treat likewise. They can be so fussy when they’re hungry or smelly!

Until the pandemic, that is.

The magazine I was editing (NatuRx: Better Living Through Cannabis) went away like a puff from a vape pen, and I asked myself a long-overdue question: What’s next?

So, miraculously, I started writing a project I’d been talking about for at least a couple of decades: trying to make sense of my adult life – the full death-march of days – by seriously considering how it all began, when I was a boy wandering through Europe, looking for purpose in unlikely places (Paris). I had no idea how to manage that narrative, what to include, what to leave out. But I learned, day to day, month to month, by doing it.

Two.

Three.

The best part of your life? Now. It’s the only time you’ve got.

Today, tomorrow and Wednesday we are enjoying posts and song selections from guest author, Peter Moore. Peter is the former editor of Men’s Health magazine, and – no fooling – once worked as articles editor for Playboy. Now he is a writer and ghostwriter living in Fort Collins, Colorado, and publishing his travel/transformation newsletter ‘The Road 2 Elsewhere’ at petermoore.substack.com. His post ‘58 New Things to Binge on’ is a fun introduction.

Grow slowly
Jeff