Woop woop! Still reveling a bit in the glow of actually putting ‘fingers to keyboard’ and hitting ‘publish’. So before the glow and excitement wear off; any good coach, mentor, inspirational-type personality will tell you that you need to keep going and build momentum. Before you know it the shine will wear off, boredom will set in, life will get busy, ‘stuff’ will happen, that doubt starts creeping back in, the excuses build up…and oh my word what am I doing?! Queue running to bed, hiding under the covers, eating ice cream and emphatically confirm to myself that this clearly was a mistake, I have no perseverance, I am an abject failure, anyone else in the whole wide world would have achieved success by now and seriously, who did I think I am?!
Not this time!
I got a supportive, motivational, master of the art in my corner and thinking of her makes me avoid the running for the covers scenario…though I’ve not been able to avoid the ice cream. Because: summer and beach and yummy chocolate motivation…some excuses are good ones OK!
(Trying to ignore the ‘come on now woman, you are typing nonsense’-comment swirling in my mind).
So I got the nerve to have a go again. I know some day I’ll look back at this and laugh at how it began. And wonder why it took so long, and why I gave myself such a hard time. Because life has already thought us some lessons right? We are old enough to know that hindsight is an amazing thing. With the knowledge that we’ve overcome what seemed like an impossible mountain to climb we grew stronger. It gave us the courage we needed to tackle the next mountain. And when we look back at the first mountain it doesn’t seem like so much of a challenge anymore. Sometimes though we look back with regret. And we wish. If only I… From that I’ve learnt that I’d rather live with the ‘regret’ of things I tried and learned from than regret what I was always too afraid to give a shot.
So knowing these things now, I try to preempt what my hindsight will be (nope, I don’t have any special powers…unless you count that time that I found the perfect pair of jeans. Now that was magic!). If I know that I will wish that I started 5 years ago and imagine where I could have been ‘by now’; and know that today this mountain feels like it puts Everest to shame but tomorrow, after being a bit battered and bruised I would have kicked some dust in its proverbial face; why would I not start? And if I took the step to start, why would I not back myself to push on?
So here’s to putting on my hiking boots, picking up that massive backpack with my survival kit (wine…heavy…must…take…with…me…), strapping myself into that wonderful (though somewhat crazy) support network and push myself one step further on this journey.
It might be slippery and I might stumble and fall. But I will brush myself off, put a Minny Mouse plaster on it, pull up my socks, take a sip (or ‘glug’) of wine and keep going.
Until next time…next time I’m packing the gin too.
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