The Next Ten
When I was little, my mom would take my sister and me skiing in the winter. My mom loved to ski, but she felt that paying a babysitter while she went skiing was too much indulgence, not to mention she thought we’d like it, so her solution was simple: Bring us with her.
(Let me take a moment to explain that here in Pennsylvania north of Pittsburgh, the possessive is to say my mom, of course. As in, “My mom made my favorite cookies.” But to say the title out loud, to call it out like a name sounds more like Mum, as in, “You need another cookie? Go ask Mum.” Now that we have that set, let’s get back to skiing.)
At first we went to a local place to learn, with smaller hills and classes for kids. But this was just Phase One of Mum’s larger plan. (To this day, she’s always up to something.) Back then, what she really wanted was to be skiing at Hidden Valley, which was bigger and had more hills. My sister and I just needed some basic skills so that we could accompany her. Simple, right?
But the plan worked. Pretty soon we were solidly into Phase Two: Piling into the car to drive the hour to Hidden Valley to “Hit the slopes,” as Mum would say. Today’s Hidden Valley has a bunny slope and multiple ski lifts, one of which is an easy, flat slide from the parking lot. But back then, the only choice was to ski down from the lodge to get onto the ski lift, and you had to weave through the skiers returning from the hills in order to do it. You needed some skills and some luck just to get to the lift that would take you up the mountain.
Once we arrived at the top of the slope, we’d watch other skiers fly by, tackling the hills with speed and grace. And we’d have our fair share of adults careening past us only to wipe out. You could stand there all day watching and waiting for just the right moment, but all you were doing was freezing and avoiding the inevitable. There was, after all, nowhere to go but down.
Mum would say, “Don’t worry about the whole hill. Take the first ten feet, ski those, then the next ten feet and so on. You can do ten feet, right?” (I’d like to tell you she said 50 feet at a time, but we didn’t ski that fast. She said ten.) Anyway, that’s what we’d do: Mentally break the hill into smaller increments, and down we’d go. In a few short feet, we’d take off and it felt like we were flying.
My mom knew we would love it, and she was right. Over the years we taught a number of friends the same basics she taught us so we could all go skiing together.
The process of writing a book is similar. You can go about it any number of different ways. But typically, by breaking it down into scenes or chapters, or by organizing the information into bite-size pieces, you’ll suddenly have a clear series of steps to take to getting it done. Ten-foot sections. Maybe that equates to ten pages. “You can write ten pages, right?”
I’m telling you this because we’re here, still at the beginning of our new year, still at the start of our projects and goals. In the distance we can see where we want to end up, and from here it can feel like being at the bottom of a mountain looking up. But it occurred to me the other day that tackling this year’s mountains might not be all uphill. (Why does everything have to start out feeling like an uphill battle?) Learning new skills, or working out, or taking chances, these things build and can snowball, which means the work ahead of us might be downhill after all, like skiing with Mum.
Once you change your perspective, from the bottom of the mountain to the top, you can’t unsee it. Instead of waiting for the perfect moment to begin, for conditions to be just right, maybe we just start, just like that. No more staring at the whole slope ahead, the entire project, the newness of it all, long enough to freeze. From where we stand, once we get moving, momentum is going to carry us. So maybe we take the leap.
My mom would tell you to point your skis in the direction you want to go, and take off. Start with the first ten feet, then the next ten.
In a moment, you’ll be flying.
