Everything I've Ever Done That Worked

By Lesley Garner

---

Be Glad You're Free; Getting Started, Every Time

---

Chapter 1: Be Glad You're Free

The following story happened at a point in my life when I was without a regular job and in a great deal of confusion as to what I should do next. A ten-year professional relationship with a newspaper had come to an end, as these things do, and part of me wasn't at all sorry. I was burnt-out. Only that summer I'd been having dinner with an old friend who was also a journalist, and she'd confessed (as we sipped our wine) that she wouldn't care if she never gave another piece of advice ever again, and I nodded and said that I wouldn't care if I ever had another opinion.

But having opinions was what I did for a living, and as the days went by, I began to realize that I'd been doing the same thing for too long to have any fresh ideas at all. I found myself approaching editors and saying that I'd love to write for them, while a tired little voice in my head muttered, "Oh no, you wouldn't." I'm sure that ambivalence communicates itself just as powerfully as enthusiasm, and I wasn't surprised when these meetings failed to translate into jobs that I didn't really want anyway. So why was I wasting their time and mine? What else could I do?

One very beautiful morning in March, I got up and followed my usual routine: Make coffee. Scan the papers. Make notes of topics I could write about. Call a couple of editors with suggestions and then wait for them to get back to me after their morning meetings. It was 10:30, and I knew that nobody would get back to me before noon. Forget about it, I thought. I'm going for a walk.

I'm lucky enough to live near Richmond Park, an ancient deer forest and nature reserve on the edge of London, where herds of red and fallow deer graze freely; and woodpeckers, owls, and green parakeets perch in ancient trees. In the woodland garden at the heart of the park, I sat on a log and watched small birds building nests in the treetops while white spring clouds flew overhead in the fresh wind.

I acknowledged, Really, it's not so bad being out of work. I thought of all my friends and colleagues stuck behind computers in gray, airless offices while I breathed in the fresh scent of grass and watched tiny birds carrying twigs overhead in the budding branches. Lucky me.

But I still needed an answer to my dilemma. What on earth should I be doing? All I knew was that the way I was going about my career wasn't working.

I began to think about a book I'd bought in Paris a month earlier called An Inquiry into the Existence of Guardian Angels. I'd bought it because when I'd flipped through the pages, I'd read that the author was a journalist who'd had the extraordinary experience of being inexplicably saved from a sniper's bullet. He quoted other witnesses to acts of miraculous protection and timely guidance, many of them tough old reporters, foreign correspondents who had inexplicably been diverted from disaster, and seasoned old cynics who nevertheless acknowledged an intervening mystery at some crucial moment in their life. I could relate to them and their experiences, and I was intrigued.

The author's argument was that guardian angels do exist. "What's more," he said, "you can build a relationship with your guardian angel by creating a dialogue, preferably out loud. You'll find that angels will communicate, and that they often have a strong sense of humor." It was an interesting book, but I hadn't thought about it until it came into my mind on my log in the wood.

There were no other people in sight on that spring morning, and as I idly watched the clouds and the nest-building birds, I found myself talking out loud. "Okay, guardian angel," I said, "if you exist, I'd like to know what on earth I should be doing about my career. Should I be looking for another column? A full-time job? A contract? With whom? Please give me a clue, and I'd like some sort of answer before I get back to the parking lot."

I remained sitting on my log. The birds continued to twitter and build nests. The little clouds still sailed over from the west. Nothing happened. Eventually I got up and started walking again, and I was so absorbed by the signs of spring all around me that I forgot about my request for an angelic message.

Half an hour later I'd turned back toward the parking lot, and I was crossing a wide-open area of grass when something caught my eye by the side of the path ahead. The area where I was walking was deserted, nothing but grasses bending in the wind and little clumps of trees. Nobody else seemed to be out walking, and I hadn't seen another person in the hour I'd been in the park.

What I found, planted in the grass at the edge of the path where no such thing had probably ever been up to that moment or has been since, was a rough wooden stick with a square of brown cardboard stuck on top of it. Written on the piece of cardboard were the misspelled words: "B glad your free."

Be glad you're free. I laughed and laughed. I turned and looked around 360 degrees. Nobody. "Okay," I said out loud. "Thank you. I get it." And I did get it.

Those words changed everything. I was free. Why was I struggling to chain myself up again? When I got home, I got out my calendar and wrote down a daily reminder not to panic, not to do the conventional thing, not to try to walk back the way I'd come. Be glad you're free. The price of freedom is insecurity, but security is often an illusion. Each time I'd wobble or get into a panic, I'd remember that I was glad to be free.

Those words and the manner of their delivery stopped me in my tracks. They turned fear and negativity into hope and courage. They stopped me from banging my head against a wall and encouraged me to take a deep breath and look around. With those words in mind, I took advice that made me decide not to do any work that didn't excite me. I went to art school and began to write about art. By the time I found myself being a columnist again, I was renewed. I had a different perspective to bring to my writing.

I don't know if I had an angelic encounter that day or whether the experience was purely coincidental. It doesn't really matter. The message worked then, it still does, and it's for you, too: Be glad you're free . . . because you're as free as you think you are.

Chapter 2: Getting Started, Every Time

It's Tuesday morning, and I'm already a day late. Why didn't I start on Monday? I'm sitting at the desk in my office, and I'm feeling besieged and overwhelmed. This is the morning I'm determined to get into the daily rhythm of writing this book. This is the day I stop procrastinating.

I'm feeling slightly sick, because I'm surrounded by piles of files and notes, and I feel that if I open my mouth to scream, a flock of papers will fly in and suffocate me. I know that I'm experiencing what millions of people feel at the beginning of a big project: panic.

I've got project paralysis. My thoughts are jeering at me from the branches of my mind like a flock of sassy black crows: Think you can write a book? Everything I've Ever Done That Worked? Well, nothing's working now. Who are you? Thought it was easy when you had lunch with the publisher, didn't you? Thought it was clever when you wrote lots of headings down on a sheet of paper, didn't you?

And what makes you so special that you think you can retreat into your own world to do this? You do realize there's no food in the fridge, right? You know that the frame of your office window is rotting and you meant to call the carpenters two weeks ago. You know there's a pile of ironing waiting for you and that's why you can't find your blue blouse?

And if you're so determined to devote yourself to writing this book, why have you let this week's calendar get so full? Check it out. You've got a dentist appointment tomorrow, followed by an editorial board meeting, followed by choir rehearsal. Won't get much writing done then. You've arranged to see your mortgage advisor the day after tomorrow, and she needs an update on your financial situation, which you haven't prepared. You meant to send flowers to that friend who drove you to the hospital last week, and you ought to call your sick parents to see if their medical test results have come through. . . .

Aaaaargh! That's the thing about having a head full of crows-they never shut up. And they have a wonderful vantage point. Your fears and insecurities are laid out below them like so much road kill. There's only one way to deal with them, only one cure for procrastination, only one answer to the perennial fear of getting started . . . and that is to take an action, no matter how small, that will move you toward your goal.

In this case, my goal is a neat pile of manuscript pages on which I've just typed "The End," but these are some of the many tempting actions that won't get me there: Getting up to make a cup of coffee, taking my ruler and pencil and drawing myself a lovely neat timetable, sticking little labels on all my files and giving them names, cutting interesting and possibly relevant articles out of the newspaper, phoning a friend . . .

All these actions could be useful in the right time and place, but that's not now, not here.

The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step . . . always . . . without exception. And the step must be in the direction of the goal and not toward the kitchen or the telephone. To have written the book, I must begin, in some small way, to write the book.

I tell the crows to come back again in a half hour if they must. It's Tuesday morning. I didn't start writing on Monday morning, and that's that. Too bad. I have this moment, always this moment. I confront my fears in the best way I know how, by naming them: Failure. Ridicule. Inadequacy. Shame. Not being half as clever as I think I am, and everybody knowing it. Not being able to sustain what I start. But I have started. The crows have fallen silent. They may be shuffling their feet along the branches, getting ready to croak, but for the moment they have nothing to say. That's what happens when you really begin. Like Indiana Jones stepping out into the chasm, it's only when you really take the first step that the bridge creates itself under your feet.

I must remember, when this happens all over again tomorrow morning, that it's the steps that make the road.

---

Excerpted from Everything I've Ever Done That Worked, by Lesley Garner. It is published by Hay House and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com.

---

Next Article

Return to This Month's Index

Go to the Home Page