Author: Andrea Grassi

Whenever you face a bigger problem, the discovery of how to solve it can take a while, many tries.
This kind of non-linear discovery, of trying, succeeding and then failing again, it’s part of how we learn things.

It’s quite easy to look back at how you arrived to the final solution through many iterative improvements, getting stuck and unstuck each time, but when you’re living in that moment when you’re stuck, when your last solution is failing and the problem is not fixed (and maybe never will) then in that moment it’s hard to believe that things will ever be fixed.
You could be tricked into thinking that you won’t ever fix it, that you’re only failing, but you get that vision only when you actually get to the other side of the spectrum, after many tries, after many successes and failures and only by keeping your mind and heart open.

Life, work, friendships. Those things are all non-linear, but in some ways we see the progression of our failures and successes as linear, as if they will stay the same as if they will continue their progression.
They might not. We go down and up continuously; we lose friends and gain friends; we forget about people we loved and love new ones; we find new struggles at work and fix things we thought were impossible to fix; and every time we think we’re at the end, that we’ve run of ideas life goes on, work goes on, everything continues.

What if you know you’ll lose the memories of your moments, 3 years after you lived them? Would that change the way you live? Would you force yourself to live more in the moment?

While I think we would all like to say “Yes”, to this question, I also think that we try to escape our responsibilities, or the rules of life. That’s why cigarettes are so popular even though we know they cause cancer.
It’s not that we don’t know; it’s not that we don’t have proof, but either because it’s an addiction or because we don’t want to admit it, we continue smoking.

The same goes with smartphone addiction, or with similar examples.
Knowing something doesn’t grant us the ability to judge clearly, to take the “right” decision.

There’s something tricky about feeling advanced, and thinking that you know more than others.

This kind of thinking usually leads you to not view some of the options that are available, to not listen to advice, to not change the course of action.

On the other hand, feeling like you’re a beginner, keeps those doors open, leaving you all the options to move, change course, and improve.

The first step is the one that opens the doors to a new world, a new foundation, a new life. The first step is how you enter a new territory and start learning something.
It’s scary, but it holds so much potential for you.

That first step can be overlooked; you could think it’s nothing special, but it is. For you and for the world, that first step is the beginning of something that might change your trajectory forever.

It’s hard to know when these first steps are actually important because, in life, we try many things. New food, new friends, new tastes. We try them, and from time to time, some of them stick more than others.
When they do, our trajectory is changed forever, the way we arrange our lives, the way we think and live, and what we want to do are changed.
A small change, perhaps, but a change nonetheless.

That’s why first steps are important. They open doors, and add possibilities to our lives. Without them, we would be in the same position forever.
First steps add options for you to change the course of your life, even if you don’t need them now.

There will be things in life we don’t understand, things that will make us cry, or worry. Things that are anchored to some experiences in our past, obscure, yet pervasive.

We might not understand them at all in the beginning, what we’ll know is that they’re there. Like an old friend who’s been waiting for us, waiting in the dark for the right moment to come and tap on our shoulders, saying “I’m still here, wanna talk?”

And if you’re lucky you’ll be surrounded by people who understand this, who had a similar friend hiding in the dark, once. People who went through this change and survived it, transformed through it.