(Hi, everybody! I’m Anne. *waves* Thanks to my friend Rachel for inviting me to guest-blog while she’s away.)
My youngest stepdaughter doesn’t like to eat breakfast. I get that some people aren’t big breakfast-eaters, but I feel pretty strongly that she needs to eat something before school, even if it’s only a few bites. This morning she took an apple with her to eat in the car on the way to school, and a few minutes after we pulled out of the driveway I noticed that I didn’t hear any chomping from the backseat.
“Eat your apple, Kit,” I said. (Note: Her name is not Kit.)
“I’m GOING TO,” she said, aggrieved. “I just don’t like taking the first bite. It HURTS.”
It was pointed out to her that someday when she is rich and famous, she can hire someone to take the first bite of all her apples for her. It was subsequently pointed out (by Kit) that that would be gross. And then we were at school, and she and her sister got out of the car and plunged into the netherland that is high school, and I was left to drive home and think about my own apples and all the first bites I’m waiting to take.
I don’t like taking that first bite into a whole apple either. I usually cut my apples up into nice, thin, manageable slices, which don’t sound all loud and crunchy and impolite when you chomp into them, and which don’t make your front teeth ache in their sockets. But sometimes there’s no way around it. You’re hungry, with no knife, and there’s an apple in front of you.
This week I am working on an article I’m scared to write. I spend a lot of time sitting in front of my computer thinking about how I Better Not Mess This Up, and how probably They’re Going to Ask Me What in God’s Name I Was Thinking, and Why I Call Myself A Writer Anyway When I Clearly Should Have Gone Into Accounting.
And then I shake myself and start making the phone calls I need to make and asking the questions I need to ask, and before I know it, I’m curious instead of anxious, and I remember that I know how to do this after all. Yes, it hurt, but just for a minute. And now I am fed.
Being Finite 
Hi, Anne, Thanks for the blog! I think I just finished an apple today, getting a newsletter written and sent out the preview. – But I was a wreck all day! Will try to follow your advice next time.
Welcome Anne. Love the apple analogy…very timely! Crunch, crunch!
Greetings to my favorite guest blogger from Meteora, where they decided monasteries weren’t cool enough all by themselves so they put them on top of these wild rock rock spires/mountains. I, too, love the apple analogy. I’m really glad I’m not the only one who does that before beginning something.