Slow and Steady Wins the Race

You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don't let that concern you. It's your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.- Anton Chekhov

Consistency is key in making non-drastic changes. Not perfection, but consistency. If you are trying to improve your body by working out several times a week, don’t beat yourself up if you miss one of your times. If you continue on with your plan and pick up where you left off, then you are being consistent. Not perfect, but consistent. And consistent will get you where you want to go. Perfect is too hard to keep up, if not impossible to achieve in the first place. To change your Future, you need to make changes consistently. It may feel like you need to do something huge in order to get any change, but that’s your perfectionism talking. We all have it. “If I can’t have it perfect right now, then there’s no point.” “There’s no point in doing just a little. What does a little do? Let’s do it big!” But big isn’t always possible, and if you do make a big change, will you be able to keep it up? Or deal with the consequences? Sometimes, you need to lay a solid foundation of consistent steps before you make a large change. Weight gain is a good example. Let’s say there’s and overweight woman. She did not go out and consume an entire buffet or a whole cow’s worth of beef or thirty-seven pies at once. She did not gain weight overnight. It took years of consistently putting in more calories than she took out in order for her to gain the weight, and that is true whether she weights 5 pounds more than she’d like or 100 pounds more. It was consistent steps that put the weight on, and it is consistent steps that will take the weight off. Homework is another good example. The person who studies a little bit of a text book every school night will have an easier time of the final exam than the one who tries to read it all in a single night. Also, a person doesn’t get their high school diploma or their general equivalency degree in a single day’s time. It takes work done consistently over a period of time. Work steadily towards your goal. It may seem like your goal is impossibly large, that you can only do it all at once, but that’s doubtful. Take a look at it again. Perhaps there are small steps you can take to prepare.

A novel? A novel is written one word at a time. Even the people who participate in National Novel Writing Month still have daily word counts and small goals to reach the 50,000 word mark. The majority of the people who succeed in reaching the goal are the ones who work a little every single day, not the people who decide three days before the deadline that now is the time to start.

A business of your own? Do you have the money you need to support yourself while your business starts up? Do you have the room for your business, wherever you decide to put your office? Have you thought up a name? Have you taken small business courses or seminars to help prepare yourself for what’s coming up? There is a lot of preparation that goes into “an overnight success”.

Leaving your spouse? Do you have a checking account of your own? Your own money? A means of supporting yourself? Do you know where your important papers are – birth certificate, social security card, marriage license, will, etc.? Do you have a place to go? Are you mentally prepared to do this? Have you looked up divorce laws to see what you need to know? Have you looked into divorce lawyers, perhaps even selected one already?

Leaving your abusive spouse? Get out as quickly as possible. Do the things I listed above, if you can (get your important papers first), and leave. You are worth more than that. There is no excuse for you to be abused, and you shouldn’t abuse yourself by putting up with it.

Even huge, important things can be accomplished with slow and steady steps. You will make mistakes. You will not be perfect. But you can be consistent and steady, and you can succeed. You can make your Future as you want.

Surgery

I had surgery a week and a day ago. It was one of the most frightening things in my life. I have cancer, and they may or may not have gotten it all. What was frightening to me, though, wasn’t the thought of cancer. I knew I could beat that. It was still early, the cancer was still small, and if that surgery didn’t get it all, a second one would. What frightened me was the lack of control I felt over the entire thing, particularly when I was in the operating room. I got in, was undressed mostly by another person while there were about seven other people in the room, very few of whom I knew, all of whom had masks. They positioned me above a hole on the operating table, spread out my arms, and strapped me down. They caused me pain – with good intent, but with little regard to the fact that I was in pain. It was “necessary” and thus my discomfort didn’t mean anything to them. I am a spiritual person, and I pray nearly every day, but I doubt I’ve prayed harder than I did that day. Afterwards, I was disoriented, separated from my family, and the doctor was gone. The doctor told my family what happened and how things were, but didn’t stick around to tell me. I heard it second hand from my family, who are not in the medical profession and thus may or may not have gotten it right. I got a phone call from my doctor almost a week later – I didn’t even get to meet with her in person. I will get to meet with her in a few weeks – almost four weeks after the surgery. I know she’s a busy person, but it angers me that I, the patient, am held in so little regard when it comes to my surgery.

I was told by my doctor on that phone call that took place a day after it was supposed to with no apologies for the delay that the type of cancer I have is more caused by lifestyle choices than by genetics or environmental concerns. Other than through smoking, I didn’t know a person could cause their own cancer. I am angry that I didn’t know this. I am angry that my doctor never told me this. I knew that being overweight can cause problems with one’s circulatory system and that one’s diet can cause problems with one’s arteries. I am exercising, and I have changed my diet. What I didn’t know was that I could cause myself cancer. Heart attacks, diabetes, hypertension – these I knew, but I didn’t know that I could cause myself cancer.

But that’s what I apparently did. And I’m angry at myself.

My doctor didn’t tell me during the phone call what I was doing that was causing the cancer, and I didn’t ask. And I’m angry at both of us for that.

My vision of the Future includes my body whole and healthy, not ravaged by either disease or surgery. I choose, today and every day forward, to birth the Future with choices that respect my body, that put my health in the forefront. I won’t have a future if I don’t continue to live, and I won’t have a full range of choices if I don’t have my health. Choices, that is what is important – options. To make the full use of what you have at the time that you have it. Without my full health, I will not have as many options. I will still have options, but not as many. But I have options today, and I make choices today, and today I choose to birth a Future with my body whole and healthy.

May your Future hold you similarly, in whatever form whole and healthy is for you.

Book Review – You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought

I’ll be doing book reviews now and again, for books I think you should avoid or ones that I think you could benefit from reading – ones that would help us create a future we want, help us focus our energies on the Future to birth it as we intend.

You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought by John-Roger and Peter McWilliams is a great book. It’s in the Life 101 series of books, which includes Life 101 and Do It Now, both of which I also recommend. You Can’t… is about how our thoughts affect our life, how our focus in life increases, no matter what that is. Have you ever known anyone who constantly was negative? Focused on the clouds instead of the sky? Always thought about the five minutes of turbulence on a plane ride instead of the three other hours of easy flight? And how did their lives go? Were they all fluffiness and sunshine? Or did they have a miserable life? (and perhaps seemed the happier for it, ironically)

Where you place your focus, your thoughts, your energy, is what increases in your life. If you focus on the negative, negative will increase, or at the very least it will seem so, because that’s all you’ll think about. If you forget to be grateful for your blessings, they’ll go find someplace where they’re welcome.

This book can help you rearrange your thoughts until they are in line with the life you want, with the Future you want. It’s an easy read. Don’t be intimidated by the size. Half the pages have a single quote on them. Let me know what you think, and if you have any books that you would suggest to those who would give Birth to the Future.

Why Me?

I’ve been wrestling with this essay for about a week and a half, not really wanting to write it because I know that it’s aimed at me as much as it is any of you. But, the basis of this post is “if this is a blog about changing the future, why do all of the posts seem to be about changing me?”

Why me? Why do I have to change? I want to bring about world peace. I want wars to end, for hunger to be wiped out, for racism to stop, and for everyone to live in harmony. I want everyone else to change. I’m fine, or at the very least doing the best that I can. I donate money (and perhaps time). I recycle. I am polite to meter maids and small children. What’s so wrong with me that we have to talk about how I have to change? Why can’t we talk about them? They’re the ones that have to change.

I’ll tell you why we aren’t talking about them – the ones who don’t bother picking up after themselves, the bosses who make racist jokes, the police officers who let off pretty women with just a warning while others get tickets, the anti-gay protestors, the vandals and desecrators. We aren’t talking about how to change them because we can’t change them. We simply can’t.

There are a lot of things we can do, but we can’t change other people. We can change their actions for a short amount of time. We can hold a gun to their heads and say “do this or die” and most will do what we want. We can withhold sex or allowances or invitations to our house or our good will. We can nag and threaten and bully. But what does that get us? A temporary change in their behavior, which they will change back once we stop actively forcing them to alter their ways. We wouldn’t have changed the people themselves.

People do change, and people do influence other people to change, but not against the other’s will. And it’s a whole lot easier to change by example than by force or coercion.

If a celebrity did a commercial on TV against smoking and you saw her later in the news smoking away, would you listen to her?

If your aunt Mabel gained 100 pounds of weight over the past year and then yelled at you for having a second piece of cake, would you listen to her?

If your sister told you not to go out with rough men and don’t let them treat you like dirt while she’s covering up her latest bruise from the fourth boyfriend she’s had in six months, would you listen to her?

No, most likely not. Because the integrity of a hypocrite is low. Because we don’t listen to hypocrites unless they’re telling us something we were already prepared to hear, whether it came from a hypocrite, a sincere person, or a fortune cookie. But someone who’s sincere, someone who also doesn’t smoke, doesn’t overeat, and doesn’t let men smack them around – that’s someone that we’re more likely to listen to.

There’s a story about Ghandi where a woman asked him to tell her son not to eat sugar. She went to him, because her son would listen to a wise man like Ghandi. Ghandi told her to come to him in two weeks with her son. In two weeks, they came back, and Ghandi told the boy to stop eating sugar. The mother asked him, if that’s all he was going to do, why couldn’t he do that two weeks ago? Ghandi replied that two weeks ago, he was still eating sugar himself.

This is why we’re looking at ourselves. This is why we are improving our own lives and our own futures. It is because the only way to get others to decide to change or at least to prepare them for change later, is by example.

And that can suck. Because it’s easier to try to change others than to change yourself. At least at first. But change is also contagious. As you change the small things, the big things become easier. And as you change yourself, you’ll find that others around you change – or you’ll discover that they won’t change and you no longer want to be the type of person who enjoys their company.

That last part is one of the more difficult things about change, and one of the big reasons why some people don’t change. They don’t want to face the big problems of their lives, so they keep around the smaller problems to focus on. They distract themselves from their spouses’ cheating (or just apathy) by concentrating on their dirty house, and they keep it dirty so that they don’t have the time or energy to “see” the cheating. They say they want a clean house, but deep down, they want their marriage more, and to not have to face the problems in their marriage, they have other problems instead.

Change yourself first, and others will follow. Perhaps not the ones that you are currently with, but others. It is, unfortunately, the only effective way. But you’re not alone. You can trust me on that.