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I will never… I am never…!
I remember starting so many statements i my life with each of those begininings.
I will NEVER do…!
I am NEVER going to do…!
Blah, blah, blah and more blah, then some more blah with cherries on top.
I know I believed wholeheartedly whatever the end of the statement was each and every time. The problem was always living up to the ‘never’. The next month, week, day, or even hour would always prove it was never a never, it was a never in only the moment it was said.
Then, the fall. Always the fall. The inevitable fall.
When you are a perfectionist, the fall is hard, so hard. When you have so little confidence to begin with coupled with so little self esteem it is excruciating.
A few years ago now I was in Prague talking about this trait of mine with a close friend ’S’, and she said…
“Choose for today”.
I thought I understood what she meant, gave it a minute or two then predictably dismissed the idea as not for me. You see… I need huge mountains to climb.
Years passed and although I was not aware, the ‘tectonic plates of me’ were moving, processing… Distilling.
“A splinter in my mind”, I find myself saying this a lot. What I mean is that something happens, something is said and it just sticks around, doesn’t pass in the course of time… It lingers.
In the back of my mind ‘Choose for today’ just lingered. I never thought directly about it but I knew it was always there, it never left me. It lingered for maybe three years, then, about a year ago after countless failed never’s, the clouds of disappointment parted and I was showered with enlightenment, the warm feeling of enlightenment.
I knew I understood the words that ’S’ had told me, I now realise I didn’t understand the meaning at all. The splinter was always there, gently itching away, constantly reminding me that there was something important for me to learn. I had ignored it for years so when enlightenment came… it was profound.
Each day is just a step to climbing the mountain. Point yourself at the mountain, but to get there focus on each step, each single step.
This is a part of me now, I couldn’t escape it if I tried, it just is. Setting myself up to fail is now not something I am happy to do. I am aware that it wasn’t ‘life’ being mean to me that created the countless disappointments before. It was me. Just me.
…
One example of how I have used this was…
A while ago I changed my diet, I didn’t go on a diet, I changed it. I knew it would be hard to do this but I have no Idea of just how hard it would be. I war on a liquid diet and created a green smoothie bar in my kitchen. For weeks this is all I ate and it worked. When I went to the store to buy the ingredients I bought a large packed of chocolate biscuits.
The reason for this was, At the outset of this diet change I purposely chose not to say the word forever. That this change would be absolute and forever. I said it would be for as long as I can with no expectation endgame.
I put all the ingredients out on the breakfast bar and placed the chocolate biscuits on the corner, right next to the fruit. The reason…
Overtime I walked past during my day, I had to reinforce my commitment not to eat the biscuits. I never said I wouldn’t eat them as I knew I would. I just said in my mind countless times a day…
“I am not eating them today, just today”.
About three months after I started I ate the biscuits. After such a long time without refined sugar I nearly vomited. I didn’t hate myself for failing, no civil war, just moved on to the next day and asked myself…
“What do I want for today?”
Thank you ’S’, it took me a while, but I get there in the end.
ps… I am not a writer, I dont profess to be. There are sometimes mistakes in my posts, this is because I wont let myself read them before I post them. If I did, I would correct the crap out of them and all original thought I feel would be lost.
So I would rather a mistake or two that edited processed perfection.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
