Accountability and grace
Monday’s blog post did not go up this week. I’ve got three pretty solid excuses that I can give for why that happened, but it’s not really worth it. While they are all valid reasons as to why I pushed off writing, they aren’t enough to justify, at least in my mind. The reality is that I did not prioritize my dream enough to make sure that I stayed consistent. That’s on me to recognize and correct.
I heard a story once, and while I am not confident that it is true, the message stands. There was a farmer whose donkey fell into a well. He didn’t have the equipment, strength, or time to pull the donkey out, so he decided to bury the donkey. He started throwing buckets of dirt down the well, knowing that, eventually, the donkey would be covered. Every time the farmer threw a bucket down, though, the donkey would shake off the dirt and take a step up. Eventually, there was enough shaking, stepping, and dirt in the well that the donkey walked right out.
We are all going to fall off track. We are all going to mess up our plans. We are all going to make mistakes. The trick is to shake it off and step back up. It does us and our dreams no good to wallow in our failings. Spending time in self-defeating mode doesn’t bring our dreams any closer to living in the real world. Staying in that mode only leaves us feeling broken and defeated. We need to be able to recognize our mistakes, say, “Oh shoot,” then fix what went wrong and get back on track.
This slip-up for me only took me off track by a few days. Wednesday’s blog post still went up, and I am back on track (albeit slowly) writing for next week. We may get off by just a few hours by missing our morning workout but making it up in the afternoon. We may get off for a few days like I did. Or we may get off for a few months or years while we get caught up in the throws of military life. An international move, deployment, or adding a child can certainly throw a significant wrench in our plans. It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been off, though. What matters is how quickly we get back on.
We need to throw our hands up in the air while saying, “Everybody makes mistakes,” and get back to it. Trust me, you and your dream will feel better with this strategy. We cannot demand perfection from anyone in our lives. This includes ourselves. Stop putting the pressure on yourself to be perfect. The reality is we will mess up on our plan, and quite a few of us will discover that we’ve been following the wrong plan this whole time. If we demand perfection, we will sink, but if we can give ourselves grace, then we can truly take the lesson from our experiences and grow through it.
The lesson for missing Monday’s post is that I have to be further ahead in my writing. I am usually writing only one or two posts ahead at a time. Getting too far ahead begins to feel inauthentic to me because I do want this to be a real-time account of my struggles and victories while chasing dreams as a military spouse. That being said, this strategy has put me in a situation more than once where I am unprepared for the next post.
The two times that this has happened are very similar. My husband was on a TDY, and I was at a work conference for the weekend. I used my husband’s absence and the fact that I was solo parenting to put off writing during the week. Then the work conference came, and I was too busy networking, learning, and socializing to make time for writing. This has happened with back-to-back meetings, and while I have three months until the next conference and no TDYs on the horizon (thank you reset phase), that doesn’t mean I can relax.
I need to take these next three months to set myself up for success when the next conference comes around. This obviously won’t be a rare situation to find myself in, and I can no longer use the excuses that I’ve used before. The buck stops here, and it is my turn to change. I get to establish the new habits now so that this never happens again (at least not for a while because, remember, we will keep making mistakes). If you’ve gotten off track with your dream, get back on as quickly as possible, but give yourself some grace for the missteps. And if you’ve tripped over the same hurdles a few times now, it is time to figure out a new system so that those speedbumps don’t hit quite as hard next time.