FAILING AND REFLECTION

Yesterday was my first failure in 4 weeks, on this 7 week challenge I set for myself. I regard it as such because it was the first time I gave in to laziness. Regardless of my previous commitment the day before not to let myself stay in bed too late, I did it anyway. So much in fact, that when I got to moving, it was too late to go anywhere and do anything productive.

So, what did I lose as a result?

• I lost the pocket money I would have received, which as I have mentioned I’m putting into my savings for the thing I want to buy.
• Next, I broke the routine I was trying to build up around my project. I didn’t put any time into it at all
• I didn’t post a blog, as I had committed myself to do the previous week. So this week I’m one blog short.

Thankfully, the day wasn’t completely aborted. I still exercised, and I didn’t muddy my diet plan. That was an upside. Also, I finished my daily to-dos in record time. So I’m glad about that, but I felt I had to list down what I failed at mainly so I could give it form, and reflect on it. I feel that when your little compromises have no face, it’s easy to brush them off. But these are the things that accumulate and form bad habits which compound and cause the natural catastrophes called loss, and wasted opportunity and unrecoverable time.

Writing them down gives them a face, so to speak and it allows me to look at them and acknowledge their presence. And once I’ve done that, I know they are there and I’ll recognize them for what they are when (not if, because we know how temptation works. It’s never gone for long. At least not when you are just starting out.) They show their faces again. I regret it, but I also gave up yesterday, deliberately, because I had a plan. I wanted to reset myself as well.

I don’t know if I’ve said this before on here, but, I tend to burn out after certain periods of continued effort. I.e., I was trying to keep to the schedule I had set for myself, and I had been doing admirably, but it had started wearing on me somehow. I felt like my system was starting to lag. You know, sort of like your laptop when you don’t properly and fully shut it down for a while. Especially when you have windows open the whole time. You’ve noticed how they glitch and hang, right? And it has happened before, it’s just yesterday I let it actually blow my plans.

Anyhow, I want to feel bad about it, but it’s gone. What’s done is done. I made my decisions and what happened, happened. I can’t take it back, I can’t change it. At this point, holding on to it and continuing stress over it won’t do me any good. It might even get counterproductive in the long run, and we do not want that.

So I’m going to acknowledge it for what it was, learn from it, and move on and do better. Hopefully, this won’t happen again. At least not for the remainder of these 7 weeks. That said, I just wanted to share my thoughts on this, and hopefully got something from my experience and this article. Still, I’m glad the weekend is here again. (Thank God! I have had a terrible week and honestly I’m not sorry to see it go.) Hope you have a great weekend, and if I don’t write this weekend, see you next week! : )