Where to Start
Over the past several years, when sitting with clients who are in a great deal of distress, I have found myself coming back to the phrase “the next right thing” time and time again. Clients ask, “What do I do? How do I move forward? Where do I even start?” What do we do when things get really bad? When we can’t really see a way forward? What can we do? What are the thoughts, actions, strategies, or steps taken that are meaningfully helpful amidst suffering?
I sometimes picture that all-too-common movie scene where someone angrily shoves everything off of their table in one fell swoop as if to try starting anew – at least for a moment. I imagine that the things shoved to the floor in a chaotic heap are the stressors that we carry around with us at any given time. With everything gone from the table, we can regain some clarity and re-focus ourselves on the most basic, foundational things that keep us going from day to day. Food, water, sleep, movement, and connection. Starting there is a perfect, very reasonable place to start. Have you eaten anything today? Have you had a glass of water? Have you gotten some rest? Have you talked with anyone? Have you been outside at all? Have you moved your body at all?
Moving through these “basics” involves seemingly small but extremely valuable steps. These small steps are a big deal. These small steps are about doing “the next right thing.”
To be honest, I’m not quite sure how this phrase started popping up in my head. I now know that it’s a phrase used often in the recovery community. And before it became prevalent there, the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, wrote about it:
“But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing.”
Put slightly differently, Jung also wrote: “In every littlest thing you do in this way you will find yourself. [Everyone has] to do it the hard way, and always with the next, the littlest, and the hardest things.“
So in a moment of suffering, or even in moments of joy, you might ask yourself, “what’s the next right thing?” and start there. For me it’s a reassuring, centering idea. We don’t have to figure everything out right now. And thank goodness for that.
For more information on this idea, check out this link:
https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/12/07/carl-jung-next-right-thing/
