Growing up, back in New Jersey, I was raised by a single mom who worked a ton to make ends meet. She typically worked double shifts at night as an emergency room nurse. Our house was small with a lot of people living in it, so we took turns sleeping on the couch; me at night and her during the day. Basically, for the first 13 years of my life we didn’t see each other much except in passing.
Occasionally though, her payday would fall on a day when I was off from school and she would take me into the hospital to pick up her check. She would show me off to all her friends, we would walk over to the bank to deposit her check and then she would say, “let’s go for a ride”. There would never be a destination picked out, never a plan. We would get into her beat up bright green Chevette, with no air conditioning (except the hole in the floorboard) and start driving.
Sometimes we would end up in the Palisades (just across the Hudson River from Manhattan) and just turn around and drive back. Other times we might end up in Fairlawn and I would get to browse in Ken’s Costume & Magic Shop (one of my favorite things to do back then). While we drove, she would talk to me and we would catch up on each other’s lives. We would almost always stop somewhere for lunch–which was a huge treat. My mom passed away a few years ago, and to this day, those are some of the happiest memories I have from my childhood. Those random unplanned days were perfect to me in every way.
I think sometimes it’s easy to get stuck in your head when you are looking at starting something new. Whether it is a design, a blog post, a new project, your own business or anything else. You feel like you need to have it all planned out. You think that the more you meditate on it, the better the outcome will be when you finally get around to doing it. The problem with this is, that more often than not, we spend so much time thinking and planning, that we never get around to the actual doing.
Sometimes, you need to embrace the imperfections and the unanswered questions and start moving forward. You may not know where your efforts will take you. You could very well fail. Or, you might find something unexpected–a hidden gem that you never imagined and would have never discovered if you were still thinking it through. Sometimes…all you need to do is just start driving.