My friend Megumi has a habit that I watched for years before I managed to adopt it myself.
Every week she puts some of her work into the world. She announces what she has been making on her social media and in her newsletter, and then she starts on the next one. And so the cycle continues.
For a long time I wondered how she did it. I had decided that Megumi was simply more diligent than me, or perhaps braver. Week after week I watched her share, and I was in awe, because I had things to share too. I had practices I’d written and ideas I’d been working on, some of them for years. They sat in a drawer and in the depths of my computer, waiting for a day that never came.
Then one day, when we were working on a project together, she said something that made me think perhaps I could do it too. She told me she didn’t always feel ready either. She had simply decided that she didn’t need to feel ready to start something and see it through. What she needed was a habit. “Make the habit first,” she said. “The confidence comes later, if it comes at all.”
The Japanese word for habit is 習慣, shūkan. It isn’t the effortful thing we tend to picture, powered by discipline and force of will. Shūkan is softer and more patient: a small act, repeated until it becomes part of how you live. With repetition it stops being a decision you have to strive for and becomes simply what you do.
There is a happy accident here. Written differently, as 週刊, shūkan means “weekly”, as in a weekly publication. Megumi’s habit is quite literally a weekly offering. The two words share a sound, and in her life they have become the same thing.
We have the same idea at the heart of yoga. Patanjali calls it abhyasa: steady practice, returned to again and again over a long time. Patanjali doesn’t say it must be dramatic. He says it must be constant. Results come from small efforts, repeated, not from one great push.
But Patanjali never leaves abhyasa on its own. He pairs it with vairagya, non-attachment: you do the work and then let go of what happens to it. I think this is Megumi’s real secret. She doesn’t hold on to each piece while she waits to see how it is received. She lets it go and turns to the next one.
Slowly, I have started to borrow Megumi’s shūkan and Patanjali’s abhyasa. I offer one small thing, and then the next, plodding gently forward. This week I sent something I have been pulling together for a very long time to someone whose opinion matters to me. My hand hovered over the send button. I wanted to wait a little longer, polish it once more, be more ready. I sent it anyway.
And now I am carrying on too, with my next small thing.
If you are reading this with a large project in mind and something is holding you back, here is what Megumi told me: you probably won’t feel ready, so don’t wait until you do.
And here is what I would add. Start smaller than feels worthwhile: thirty minutes at your desk, or one conversation with someone who might know something. Slowly gather the pieces until you have one offering. Release it, let it go, and begin the next. Then do it again. You don’t need confidence to start. You need the habit: shūkan, abhyasa, whatever you want to call it.
The world is quietly waiting for the thing only you can make. Don’t leave it in the drawer any longer.
