baby steps.
“Baby steps.”
I have lost count how many times I have sent those two words to my friends in the past three weeks. As much as it is a reminder to them, it is also a reminder to myself. A reminder to give and receive grace, when I fall short of my own expectations, or when the mountain before me seems a little bit higher than I expected it to be. I don’t know about you but I am beyond impatient when it comes to getting things done, or aligning myself to the next chapters and adventures that life decides to throw my way. Even though I have gotten better at learning to sit on my hands and be idle when the circumstances demand it, it is still mortifying and uncomfortable.
I am writing this as a lesson and a reminder to myself that the lessons come through the journey we travel through and not the destinations we arrive at. We will all get there if we push ourselves to try, but if we move at a pace where we may not realize we are prepared for, we may allow that end goal to slip away from grasp. Before my world’s collide and the proverbial shit hits the fan, I am taking the time today, to remind myself that there is no rush, and that courage comes just by showing up little by little, day by day. To paraphrase Brené Brown, sometimes the win, is not to get the prize at the end, but the courage to step into spaces that we have never showed up in. The “win” is to be brave, and sometimes to be brave requires us to engage in baby steps.
As annoying as it is to recall, I have always hammered into myself the notion that I should not learn to run before I learn to walk, and the running may mean learning to juggle competing priorities and expectations, where the walk, is learning how to manage one thing only, and one thing well. Often times, in our desire to get ahead, we forget that life is a race with ourselves and not with anyone else. We dictate our pace, and we need to run life in a way that allows us to endure throughout our seasons. If we go too fast, we may trip and fall, causing us to hurt ourselves along the way.
I made an appointment this week for a referral to a mental health professional. It was a baby step almost five years in the making. I have always been an advocate for therapy, and I will wholeheartedly support anyone who chooses to take that step, but I have always run around the question, whenever it came to my own experience. Perhaps its the PTSD of living within the residual trauma and the unresolved grief, the spaces and dark closets we would rather leave closed, or its the uncertainty of maybe having a semblance of normalcy, and that the tension which I have held so much as part of my identity goes away and transforms itself into something a little more hope-filled. Either way, I find myself reminding myself again that just because I showed up, it does not mean that I should get ahead of myself. It is so easy to get caught into the whirlwind of life, and I find myself being distracted by one particular cycle, that I have until now been able to treat with indifference. Yet perhaps it is a sign I cannot ignore my feelings any further. Either way, baby steps are in order. One foot beyond the other. A gentle pace, a continual pace. Step by step into the unknown.