Opening Day
On getting started
My paternal grandmother was a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan. Every year starting in the mid 1930s until April 1985, ten months before cancer claimed her life, she attended opening day at Fenway Park.
To those who aren’t baseball fans, the season is long. To those who love the sport, it’s not long enough.
The anticipation sports fans feel each year as opening day approaches is exciting to witness in its own right. The beginning of anything is rife with possibility. No one has gotten hurt yet. Plans haven’t been tested and thus feel secure and smart. All bets are on.
Everything and anything is possible.
Starting is easy.
In a culture such as ours obsessed with makeovers and transformation and second, third, fourth chances, we have created an enormous economy around beginnings.
New love.
New job.
New you.
The internet is choking with information about how to start something new. Not so much about finishing and certainly even less about the slog, the middle, the grind.
Platitudes about the hustle and getting shit done abound. But they are superficial and discouraging. How am I supposed to #GSD when I’ve never gotten shit done before?
I simply don’t have the skills.
Which leads me to my less than scientifically proven conclusion that almost everything on the internet is bs. Positioning, posturing, blowing smoke…
And these days, so much outrage about everything.
Maybe the problem isn’t that starting is easy.
Maybe it’s that we’ve mistaken starting for progress.
Opening day comes whether you’re ready or not. The crowd shows up. The field is perfect. Everyone believes.
And then the season begins.
Not the highlight reel. Not the montage. The long stretch of ordinary days where nothing feels certain and no one is watching.
That’s where it counts.