Perseverance
I don’t wanna. That’s the way I’ve been feeling the past couple of days. Ok, past couple of weeks really, but more intensely the last couple of days. It’s the home stretch for the end of the school year so maybe that’s rubbing off a little from my kids. It’s also the beginning of summer, which in the sunny Southwest is a time for hibernation and managing the constant sogginess of waistbands and armpits. But mostly it’s because momentum, the Big Mo, is waning.
After taking the leap to go “all in” on my dream of working by myself for myself, there was a flurry of activity that felt like forward progress. It WAS forward progress. Getting a business name, a federal ID number, setting up blogs and websites, brainstorming and dreaming all the things this venture could be. Now it’s time to do the work. 2016 ended with a fair amount of momentum moving me through the first quarter of 2017. Just like taking a long bike ride, I find myself at the bottom of an incline needing to harness the energy to get the pedals pumping again to get to the next summit.
Perseverance. One could argue that all of life is perseverance. But I don’t want to “just” persevere. I want to find the joy in the struggle, the hard work of living my calling and doing what I love. No. That’s not entirely true. What I really want to do right now is sit down on the couch and binge watch Leverage on Netflix for the next 24 to 72 hours and just forget all about this pesky notion of perseverance.
But I can’t. I won’t. I choose not to. Because how could I ever find a good enough explanation to describe to my kids, one highly observant teenager and a too-smart-for-her-and-my-own-good pre-teen, why it’s OK for me to do the very thing I have been on my soap box about for the past….oh…hundred years? 100 kid years, that is.
Perseverance. Sometimes you gotta do what you don’t wanna do. I read something quite a while back that I use on my kids to help them come to terms with the “don’t wanna’s”. I wish I could find the source but, alas, that information is long gone from the memory banks. It goes something like this, “If you do what you have to do when you have to do it, then you get to do what you want to do when you want to do it.” And I wanna do a lot. I want THEM to do a lot. I want them to find value within the mundane, in as much as it helps them experience the vibrancy that life has to offer. It opens more choices if we manage the “don’t wannas” rather than letting the don’t wannas manage us.
So I sat down and wrote, and sent the emails I didn’t want to write and send, and I managed to get a good 30 minutes of healthy activity in today. I persevered beyond the leftover Easter basket candy and had a healthful breakfast. And tonight, I am going to plop myself down on the couch and binge watch Leverage because as much as my inner demons fought me, I created space to allow the don’t wannas to hang around while perseverance kicked their butts.