Examing Life’s Lessons

A journey of a thousand miles continues with the next step – modified Confucius

How many times have you taken that first step and then quit? You got discourage because the results did not come after a couple of days. You let laziness creep in because it was easier to sit in front of the TV. You spent more time with people you have never met face to face (online gaming) than with your kids.

I have kept a journal at different times in my life. Consistency would not be a word to describe my efforts in writing down my thoughts. It is comparable to touching a grasshopper. At times you can push and shove the grasshopper and it stubbornly will not move, then suddenly it leaps and flies a great distance just to not move again. I will write furiously for a week or two or three and then abandon it. Sometimes I abandon it for a couple of years.

I have made attempts to record my musing/dreams/rants to better organize my thoughts. The hope was that something “better” would come out of it, some sort of progress would rise up from the pages. After a period of time, I found I was writing the same thing I wrote in the last journal attempt. I found it incredibly frustrating.

So instead of making a change, I stopped writing. I continued doing what came easiest to me which was my normal activities. Just like water finds the easiest way down a hill, I found myself doing what I always did with the same justifications, day after day, week after week, year after year. I did not really want to put much effort in making changes.

I am not sure when I learned this about myself, if you pressed me for a guess it would be in my mid 20’s. I learned this, I was a perfectionist. I was not a perfectionist in the sense that things had to be some arbitrary way. Instead things just had to be done the “right” way and it had to done that way the first time. Ok, you can stop laughing now.

So when I could not do things the “right” way the first time, I would simply no longer attempt to do it. If you don’t try, then you don’t fail. If you don’t fail, then you don’t feel bad. I stopped journaling as it was not making any difference in my life. Then I would go back to it to be at least doing something. When I look back in hindsight, good has come out of it. I learned I am stubborn in my laziness. It showed me that I thought about things too much and then let laziness rob me of opportunities.

Now, I am sure that some of you might have thought or said, “Duh, AC, if you don’t do anything, you can’t expect change”. In my earlier years, I sure would have said something similar. I could list many sayings about failure, experience, redefining how to view failure. I won’t, not in this post anyway. This post is about taking that next step, about the need to press on, to continue making an effort in your journey.

At the end of November 2007, I started a journal again. I have continued to use it almost daily since that first day. It is the longest I have kept at it. The difference is that I am more determined to make changes in my life. Remember the last post I made about taking the first step? I have learned this about myself, when pressure is applied in my life, I respond by making changes to meet those pressures.

“Inside every old person is a young person wondering, ‘What the heck happened?’” I don’t know the original person to attribute this quote, but I heard it from the fount of wisdom, Larry the Cable Guy himself. In my mind where my thoughts live, I am not that old. Yet, my body tells me that all is not the same. I don’t heal as fast as I did at 18 years old. Eating junk food for a weeks on end hides the stomach muscles I know are in there somewhere.

This time my journal is more than a journal to dump thoughts and feelings. It has goals recorded along with objectives. A goal is something “better” I want to see happen. An objective is something that accomplishes the goal but can be seen happening by others. For example, a goal I have is more focused time with my wife. Focused time means where we are doing something that involves interacting that does not involve the pets, kids or household issues. One objective has been just the two of us to go out to eat. Another objective has been to have the kids not talk to us for a period of time so that we could talk about our day. Some have called this “Couch time” although it is kitchen time for us. The first 30 minutes I am home and the wife and I are in the kitchen, it is our time to talk about the day without interruptions from the kids.

You are on a journey of a thousand miles. Each step that moves you forward is a successful step.

What has kept you from taking the second step, the third?