The Thursday of the third week of my Leadership in Action Project heralded a breakthrough. It was the moment I took pen to paper, scratching across the lined pages of my small, cerulean-blue notebook to physically map my ideas.

The work that morning had consisted of a teambuilding call with members from the Paris office and field officers from India and Nepal. The hour and a half of introductions, conversations, and exercises all centred on communicating and receiving feedback, and had laid the foundations for a period of focused reflection. 

This afternoon I had decided to use this space to tackle my creative block. Addressing all the work and research that I had collated so far initially felt like opening a safari page in my brain; hundreds of different tabs open, so many you could not even see all of them, just felt their presence stacked in the back of your mind – two or three were even playing distracting sounds, talking over each other in an increasingly annoying pitch, but I’d be damned if I could’ve found them to close them.

But, with a few stinted efforts, I overcame the previous block, and I was able to sketch the outline of Letters to Our Friends onto the small A5 page, mapping where each article and testimony might go. There was a skeleton of an introductory editorial, an interview that would define a definition of Hope and would structure the Letters, and the use of hope theory to link articles together based on concepts of goals, agency and pathways. Having sat with this tangled ball of thread for a number of days, I felt immense satisfaction – and pride – at being able to slowly tease out the knots, scribbling down questions as I found problems. It was a slow process that required patience, but soon I felt I had smoothed the mess of my ideas into a straight thread – with clear beginning and end. All of a sudden, the open tabs of research, of random article ideas, statistics and quotes had all been closed (and the random music switched off) – morphing into a clear story board of beginning, middle and ending. And it was incredibly rewarding.

But this moment where it clicked hadn’t come without hard work. Three weeks of introductory conversations, learning more about all the people who make up what Karuna-Shechen is, and the independent research hours, sifting through pages of material, and critically looking through resources. It required ambition, to find solutions and challenge myself, and an essential curiosity, to experiment and to ask how this could be done differently.

So, I guess this is a nod to the fifth draft sitting in your files, of words scrambled on a page, dredged from your wildest thoughts – almost there but not quite. And this nod is my promise to you, that even if it feels insurmountable and senseless, after countless scrunched up sentences that leave you pinching the bridge of your nose in frustration and a cold swooping fear that it may never work, it will make sense. It will. The moment will come when it does work out, but you must stay the course. You must commit to the process and try again; the second, the third, the fourth time. You must scrutinise and reassess, perhaps turn the page upside down, and try again.

But you must not give up.

You can make mistakes, you can retrace your steps, you can try and fail and try again, and again, and again.

But giving up is not an option.

It is always too soon to throw in the towel.

And I believe this philosophy applies to far more in life than the first draft of my article.