Lessons in Gratitude Day 14

Small steps are still steps. Small actions are still actions. Every once in a while I get antsy that I am not making enough progress or doing enough fast enough. I wrote a few days ago about crossing something off the to-do list–bathing the dog. Now by all accounts bathing the dog is not a major accomplishment. But it needed to be done and it got done. Yesterday I took a number of small steps on a number of things I am working on. At the end of the day I somehow felt like I needed to do an accounting of what I had accomplished today, then judged that I had not gotten enough done.

The truth is that no one is standing over me telling me what to do, then watching me do it, and then making sure that it gets done. There is a certain amount of comfort in having a degree of accountability, and accountability is good in its place. But when I’m operating from a sense of desperation and panic about all the things I need to get done, nothing good can result from that. I get so mired in what I “should” be doing, that it totally freezes my creativity, my energy, my mental capacity and either nothing gets accomplished or what I do get done is a very poor representation of what it could have been. Layer on top of that the guilt that I didn’t finish what I had set out to do, never mind that what I set out to do was potentially unrealistic in the first place.

So while my plan is to create some structures that help me get things done, it’s important that I pay attention to the energy behind what I’m creating. It’s quite possible to make everything hard and complicated and to do things from a sense of panic. What I hope to bring into my structures is a sense of ease. There’s a lot to be said for going with the flow—swimming against the current is exhausting and counterproductive. Something I read today from Oprah aligns well with this, “This, I’ve known forever, is the great metaphor of life: Move with the flow. Don’t fight the current. Resist nothing. Let life carry you. Don’t try to carry it.”

I’m grateful for the small steps I manage to make every day and the small actions I take. There are days when I don’t have giant steps in me and sometimes bathing the dog is the best I can do. But every step forward—large and small—takes me closer to my destination than sitting still would. Eventually these small steps will merge together into larger ones and I’ll hit a smooth and confident stride. Until then I’ll be patient (and gentle with myself) and enjoy the scenery along the way.