It’s 11:19 pm and I’m sitting in my living room reflecting on the day. It did not go anywhere near what I hoped. (So maybe this post is meant for one of you reading it and the events of today got me to this place of writing it. You’re welcome.)
Today is one of those days where my flesh goes ‘seriously God? How am I ever gonna get from where I am to where you’ve shown me I’m going? How am I ever going to herd my scattered cat-thoughts consistently enough to make them follow the direction you lead?’
I started my day by watching Michael Hyatt’s latest podcast: ‘The one way to guarantee you won’t succeed: 6 Tricks for training yourself to persist when you want to quit’. I’m no where near wanting to quit but I am smirking to myself that the day started with tips for persistence…and today has been a day of choosing persistence.
I finished the podcast and was ready to tackle my day. I had planned to write a blog post (that should’ve been easy because it was all laid out in my head – I just had to get it to the screen), get some laundry done, make more progress on our current ‘spring cleaning on steroids’ scenario, and get in a quick 10 minute walk. I know exercise is important but I have yet to start and maintain any type of work out routine so I’m starting small: At least three 10-min walks per week.
Somewhere soon after the train left the station, the conductor threw the scheduled itinerary out the window and decided to take a joy ride through…something…chasing squirrels or butterflies or what was I talking about again? Oh look at the cute widdle wabbit…
Some days I wake up and am on point. Gears are moving like a well-oiled machine and I hit a home run in the productivity department. Other days are like today and it doesn’t matter how much I prepared or planned, I find myself going ‘where the heck did today go?!’ and ‘has anyone seen my missing brain cells?!’ I’m still very much a work in progress, and I have a feeling it’s going to be a life-long learning process, but I’m at least a step closer to the place where I can appreciate the small victories.
As of 9:00 pm, after spending the evening celebrating my brother’s birthday with family via a FaceTime date, the only thing I had accomplished from my goal list was a partially completed blog post. I started it and words started flowing and then so did the distractions. Hubby came home early, dogs wanted attention (yes they’re dogs, but if you know anything about pugs you understand), people showed up to take care of a nuisance animal situation, and my highly sensitive person nature started to pick up on every.single.little.noise. and my brain was not able to think. In a perfect world I would follow the advice I hear so often of ‘push through! no excuses! make it happen!’ but when your brain and body don’t want to cooperate, I just don’t know how to move forward anyway. Believe me I’ve tried. I can drive myself crazy thinking and feeling like I’m a slacker because I just can’t seem to get all parts of me moving in the same direction some days.
But as I said, I’m a step closer to doing life well as ‘me’ so instead of dismissing today as a total failure, at 9:00 I thought ‘I at least made a little progress today, even if it felt microscopic compared to what I hoped to achieve’ and asked myself ‘what else could I possibly do?’
I really wanted to get in the 10 minute walk so I took the dogs out on a trip down our street and back. Check. Then I realized I could still at least get a load of laundry started so I did. Check. As I sorted the laundry I thought about the blog post I started earlier and realized there was no way I was going to finish it tonight (at least not where you’d probably understand it)…but thoughts for this blog post started coming to mind so I decided to attempt to accomplish the blog goal even if it looks different than what it was when I started. (so if you’re reading this, obviously that item got a check in the block and you can eagerly anticipate the original blog post for today! 😉 )
Today won’t go down in the record books as one of my most productive days ever. But I still made forward progress even if it feels like baby steps. If nothing else, I hope this post encourages you to know that you’re not alone if you also feel like you’re on a baby-steppin’ journey some days.
The choice to determine the direction of movement in our lives is up to us. Even times of failure and situations that feel like set backs can become forward progress if we choose to learn from them. Here’s to new days, fresh starts, and celebrating small victories. Now it’s time for bed.
Image Credit: Erin Kass