When I begin thinking about anything new—an idea, a project, a direction—I often find myself slipping into a kind of mental gravity. One thought leads to another, and suddenly I’m no longer at the surface of an idea but somewhere deep inside it, moving through layers I didn’t intend to enter. I’ve always been prone to this: rabbit holes, spirals, the quiet pulling apart of a thought until it becomes something else entirely.
But I’ve started to wonder if this isn’t just distraction. Maybe it’s the beginning of something.
If you really trace it back, where does a venture actually begin? Not the planning, not the execution, not even the decision to start—but the moment before all of that. The moment something begins to pull at you. It can feel small at first, almost unnoticeable. A thought you don’t dismiss. A question that doesn’t settle. A tension that doesn’t resolve.
Sometimes it feels like a tickle of an idea that won’t leave you alone. Other times it feels like a thorn—something you can’t quite remove because it keeps catching your attention every time you try to move past it.
Recently, I saw a book cover with a single red string draped across it. I don’t remember the context of the book itself. When I searched for it later, I found interpretations that were political, spiritual, symbolic—each one attempting to assign meaning to it. But none of that mattered to me in the moment I saw it. What stayed with me wasn’t the explanation, but the image itself.
A red string.
Simple, unassuming, almost accidental. And yet it has been sitting in my mind ever since, like it is trying to connect itself to something I haven’t fully understood yet.
I keep thinking about how ideas begin this way—not as fully formed intentions, but as fragments that pull on you. A visual. A phrase. A tension. Something that refuses to disappear quietly. You don’t always choose it. It chooses you first.
And maybe that is the real beginning.
Not the decision to create something, but the moment something begins to insist on being seen.
A pull. A thread. A shape you don’t yet understand, but feel compelled to follow anyway.