A very good place to start

‘Let’s start at the very beginning

A very good place to start’

In The Sound of Music, when Julie Andrews sings these lines at the beginning of the song Do Re Mi, it’s hard not to sing along.

And while the beginning is, indeed, a very good place to start, it’s definitely not the place you should keep coming back to every time you work on something you’re creating or learning.

I have a habit of asking my piano students to start a piece in the middle or near the end instead of the beginning. A terrible habit of mine, they would no doubt say, because it’s really hard to do and it feels wrong.

It can leave you feeling unmoored, knocked off track, as if you’ve been dropped in the middle of nowhere instead of somewhere you’ve ‘walked’ through so many times before.

Weaknesses that were easy to gloss over or even not notice when you were used to travelling from the beginning to the end can no longer be ignored. Like shining a torch on sections of a path that you can do with your eyes shut when you travel it all in one go but would have no hope of navigating were you to land in the middle of it.

Always start at the beginning and the middle is merely what comes next.

You’ll know the beginning intimately, every stone, every landmark. While the middle becomes somewhere you’ve never really stopped, maybe only slowing down sometimes as you pass through. And the end becomes somewhere with which you’re only vaguely familiar.

It’s like travelling the same route home every day on auto pilot. You don’t need to think about it because one step follows the other until you reach home without even thinking about how you got there. Momentum carries you through. Stop, and that disappears.

Approach a piece of music this way and that’s pretty much exactly what happens.

Each phrase cues the next.

If you’re playing piano, your fingers know what to do by association, this note leading to the next one. But if you were to become distracted and break the flow, make a mistake, or suddenly panic—ahem, I have been there—then chances are your only option would be to stop and go back to the beginning to try again.

The alternative of picking up where you left off feels nigh impossible because you only know it in relation to what has come before. Notes that you played through a moment ago now seem impenetrable, out of context because there is no longer any context in which these notes make sense.

But if you were to deliberately start playing anywhere but the beginning, really learning the notes so your fingers know what to do no matter where you start, then a whole new world opens up.

I tell you, it takes an enormous amount of concentration to do this, but this will be a world in which you’re in control, steering rather than allowing auto pilot to do it for you.

After all, in life we join conversations halfway through and step into tasks and jobs that are already in progress. We become part of families, communities, and creative projects that have their own histories long before we arrive, and that may well continue after we’re gone.

Finding your bearings somewhere in the middle is one of life’s most useful skills. And perhaps approaching music in this way is really just practising it.

We can approach any creative activity in this way.

Tackle a creative project from the same spot each time and you end up polishing the same few paragraphs, tweaking the same notes over and over, rehearsing the same introduction.

The same roadblocks appear again and again, the bits you’ve already created starts to feel tired and overworked, there’s little energy or creative spark, and no clear path for where it might go next.

But tackle the same project from another angle, turn it on its head, and deliberately leave the beginning behind, and you’ll likely find new paths you could never have imagined.

Creative possibilities will open up that you would otherwise not have known existed.

When I force myself to shift my focus, I always realise how set in stone things were becoming. A beginning I might have already reworked over and over becomes redundant, transformed into something else.

And my imagination is sparked because I’ve managed to let go of what seemed so certain and embrace possibility, and the uncertainty that comes with it, instead.

We’re designed to go for comfort rather than hardship. We crave certainty over uncertainty, and we like to daydream instead of always having to focus. There's something deeply comforting about beginning where we always begin, because we can settle into the familiar rhythm and let it carry us.

But how wonderful is it to create something and know you’ve left no stone unturned?

How amazing is it to finally have created something—a piano piece, a dance, a poem, a painting, whatever it might be—with such care that the only thing left to do is sink into it and daydream?

Not because you’re on autopilot, but because your feet know every step of the way.

And just in case you’ve forgotten what it sounds like, here’s the wonderful Julie Andrews singing Do Re Mi, and starting at the very beginning: