Chromatic04.com

The past couple of weeks, I’ve been sick. 

I bring this up not only as an explanation for the gap between posts, but to show the mindset I’ve been in for my entire life. My entire life up until a few days ago, to be precise.

When university let out for the summer, I thought about all the goals I wanted to reach by the end of it. I counted the weeks I had and determined the amount of progress I could make within that period of time.

However, I got sick. A common cold, with the only remains of it now being a slight cough, not long term by any means. Regardless of how insignificant this sickness is in the span of my life, it felt as though all my plans were put on pause.

Instead of being kind to myself or giving myself any grace to rightfully postpone these plans, I berated myself. As though I was using the cold as an excuse to be lazy and do “nothing” all day, which wasn’t true, but I sold myself the lie convincingly anyways.

Thus, I decided that some of my plans would have to be postponed all the way until the start of the fall semester, to work on until the beginning of winter break. If I don’t have time to complete it by the time school starts, then why would I even begin? The whole point is to have something to show after spending months practically away from society (or, in this case, school). If I had some half-finished skill, that wouldn’t do; it had to be pushed back until it could be completed in one segment of time.

It was this line of thinking that got me, well, thinking. Rather than setting my timeline as “end of summer break,” I should set it for “my life.”

My life, my entire existence on Earth, is my timeline. I don’t need to break it up further than that for some arbitrary sense of progress towards a skill or project. 

See, this miniscule shift in thinking is going to allow me to start my plans, two weeks after I was dead set on starting them. In the middle of the week too! I won’t accomplish “the end result” by the end of summer, but that hardly matters. I will have made progress, and I’ll celebrate what I’ve done and continue improving at the beginning of the semester.

My progress is no longer towards one set point, and is now a series of milestones with the end goal of learning and growing as much as I can or desire to.

I don’t need to be able to run a ten minute mile by mid-August, but while working towards that milestone, I will have achieved greater stamina which is progress all by itself.

It’s little shifts in thinking like this that shows how much growth I still have the potential to do as a human being. It’s easy to see the glaring flaws, but to adjust habits you thought were perfect, that’s the difficult part.

Difficult, but oh so worth it.

Until next time,

– Chromatic

*Posted on May 26, 2024.*