//------------------------------// // Importance // Story: Singular Entities // by Cynical //------------------------------// Where to start… that’s always the question, isn’t it? There are usually others – minor qualms and worries that need satisfying – but it always comes down to that one inevitability. There has to be a point, somewhere along the line, where someone looks up and asks it. I bet that’s what happened when someone decided to document the history of the world. The world is a big place; it has a lot of history and a bit of it would have happened at the same time. How do you start something so monumental and important? There’s never a right way; that’s for certain. There’s never a right way to write the number eight on a sheet of paper. There are wrong ones, yes, but there’s never an exact formula for the unmistakably correct way of writing it. You could start from an infinite number of locations; the top, the middle, the bottom, the side, the other side, between them. As long as you kept bisecting the line, you’d always find a new starting point that was neither wrong nor right, that part solely dependant on how you continued. They probably had that trouble with the maps of the world. Once you mark one line of one village, it’s there; you can’t lift the ink away from the paper anymore, you have to live with the choice and move the features of the land around that one line. It’s why the start is so important; why the end doesn’t have to matter so much. The end is just another stage in completion - The start is the stage itself. A plan is made up of two stages: the idea, and the implementation. They’re useless without each other. You need one to give vision and the other to lend substance to that idea. To have one without the other would be pointless. And where did all plans start? That was the question. The plan is important. The idea is flexible; drawing a circle is easy - flexible. The implementation is not. It’s where you pick one of a million- a billion- possibilities, and follow on from that as best as you can in theoretical terms alone. The execution was where you had to excel. That was where your plan was set in stone, where the start of your plan was put to the test along with all subsequent decisions. It’s always such a simple question; that’s the beauty of it. Where do you start? How do you know what possibility out of many is the right one. There are nearly 319 billion combinations of the first four moves in a standard chess game. All of those spring from twenty different ways to open the game. The start opens the way to new possibilities; it sets you on a path that you cannot change. There’s no way to tell which of those is the right – or the wrong – paths until you have followed them to the very end. I suppose one start is as good as any other though – and it’s certainly better than no start at all. I suppose this is my own; my own declaration of intent and my own promise of what I am doing. ‘Dear Princess Celestia…’