On Beginning Again

Another passage from STILL WRITING, just out this week:

The page is your mirror.  What happens inside you is reflected back.  You come face-to-face with your own resistance, lack of balance, self-loathing, and insatiable ego –– and also with your singular vision, guts, and fortitude.  No matter what you’ve achieved the day before, you begin each day at the bottom of the mountain.  Isn’t this true for most of us?  A surgeon about to perform a difficult operation is at the bottom of the mountain.  A lawyer delivering a closing argument, an actor waiting in the wings.  A teacher on the first day of school.  Sometimes we may think that we’re in charge, or that we have things figured out.  Life is usually right there, though, ready to knock us over when we get too sure of ourselves.  Fortunately, if we have learned the lessons that years of practice have taught us, when this happens, we endure.  We fail better.  We sit up, dust ourselves off, and begin again.