I have no idea what to write about. I’ve been working on Advance Daily’s for a few hours now, trying to get a bunch of them out and ahead of the game.

My mind feels a little dry and with not much else to say.

But writing, I have found, is much like cooking.

In cooking I hardly know what I want to make at any given time. After years and years of cooking my mind goes blank and my creativity dries up when given the task of one more meal to make.

And yet, I’ve found a trick when it comes to cooking. I just start cutting an onion.

Yup, that’s right, I simply get an onion out, the cutting board, my knife, and start in. And somewhere in the process of getting the skin off the onion, of making my slices, the next step takes form.

I get some olive oil heating up in a pan, and then one ingredient after another comes to mind, other vegetables, spices and seasoning, accompanying starch or meat, and without a lot of strain there is a meal ready to be savored.

Writing is the same, we simply must start in. Some months back my daughter was crying the blues that I wasn’t ‘teaching’ her how to write.

Now I am a writer, and I know how this works. So I just kept telling her, “Just start writing.”

“But… but… but…” she protested, “I want one of those writing books, a this and a that…”

“Just start writing.”

It took some time, quite a bit of time, but finally she started in, and within some minutes had a stunning poem about her dog that had simply flowed out of her.

Today this poem graces her bedroom wall.

And this is writing. Where our hearts simply overflow and where words are put to emotions and character and experience.

Life is the same. Exactly the same.

While we are looking for formula and for instructions and for lessons, we miss that life is here to be lived. That we figure out living as we live, not before.

We must just start in.