One of my practices for 2012 is taking a short daily walk, out my front door in my south Minneapolis neighborhood. I love to be outside, but even so it’s hard to tear myself away from my work, the phone, the computer, the thousand things needing to be done. Walking means taking purely enjoyable time for myself when I always have a long to-do list and people I care about who I think I’ve let down. Like writing, it’s something I have to give myself permission to do.
I was raised as a hiker and backpacker, and walking comes naturally to me. I know it as intimately as I know the way my hair flips over the left side of my face when it’s cut a certain way. For two summers when I was in my 20s I worked on the Long Trail. I know what it feels like to settle into your stride. I know what it feels like to push yourself up a hard hill. I know what it’s like to get lost in your thoughts while your legs pump away, unconscious, competent.
Then a few years ago, I was injured. The next year, I was injured again, on the other side of my body. I still don’t walk exactly right. I’m always surprised by my caution, by not quite feeling my right foot, by the pain in my knee. I still love to be outside and I love to walk, but the experience isn’t as familiar any more. Today at 2:30 I finally went downstairs for lunch. I ate quickly and did some dishes, put on my shoes and walked out the door. It was overcast, but warm. There’s no snow cover to speak of, and everything was shades of brown and grey. The sidewalks were mostly bare and occasionally wet and icy. I had to slow down for the spots I would have plowed through, another year. I’m so afraid of falling or even slipping and hurting myself again.
The birds were singing madly.
Even in the city, the air was wild and fresh.
Within half a block I was happy.

I’ve been stewing about this first blog post for days weeks months. I have lots of notes and ideas and half-written posts about other topics. But in the first post, the topic is…what? Who I am? What I’m doing here? Why you should read this? Suddenly I can’t think of anything to say.

Of course, in a way, everything I write is about me. Whatever I’m looking at or thinking about, I see it through my own lens. You can get to know me through what I notice, what I love, the way I think. Pointing that lens at myself, though, requires contortions, or extra equipment. A tripod. A timer. The whole thing makes me squirm. Everything I write feels stilted, as uncomfortable as I am. If you can’t begin, how can you get going?

And then I remembered something my grandmother used to say: begin as you mean to go on.

I mean to go on by practicing what I preach.

“Just get started,” I tell my clients. “Spill first. Then revise,” I tell my clients. Okay. Here I am, spilling.

(Yes, I revised too. You didn’t get to see that part. This time. I have to save something for later.)

I mean to go on by being straightforward.

I’m Beth Wallace. This blog is mostly about my work. I’m a personal and executive coach, and I’m a book development editor.

I help people get unstuck. (I know. Irony is my friend.) Sometimes they’re trying to put their Big Ideas down on paper. Sometimes they’re trying to make a life shift that they can’t quite get started on. Sometimes they want to know why they’re suddenly exhausted by the work they’ve loved for so long, the work that helps them change the world.

I mean to go on giving people whatever I can that will help them get it done.

Whether “it” is the book or the job change or restructuring the position (or the organization) or the move to another country or the next degree. Or whatever else is on their minds.

I’m going to do as much of that as I can in this blog. I’m going to share the stuff I know already and the stuff I figure out as I go along, and the stuff I learn from my brilliant clients. (They’re all brilliant. That’s why I love my work.) I know that the process of articulating what I’m thinking about or what I notice will make my thinking clearer. I hope that something I write will be useful. And I really hope that eventually it’ll be a two- or three- or dozen-way street, a conversation, a community, all talking about stuff we care about, all helping one another move forward.

Finally, I mean to go on being myself.

I’ll probably write about social justice. I’ll probably write about my garden, cooking, knitting, my cats. I might write about my beloved home state, Vermont, or my beloved adopted neighborhood, Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis. Who knows? There might be poetry.

In fact, let’s close this first post with a poem. My mother taught me to read using Robert Frost. This is one of the first two poems I learned to read, at the tender age of four.

The Pasture

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.

Robert Frost, 1915, from North of Boston.