Last year my mother in law gave me 100 daffodil bulbs and I planted them ALL last fall. Spring is finally here and all that effort has paid off! Not only do I have a ton of beautiful daffodils but I didn’t know they were all different varieties! ( I also didn’t know there was more than one variety of daffodil!) So every day I get to go out and admire these beauties and find out what new variety popped up that day.
It got me thinking about how what we do today directly affects what our future will look like. It’s not that I didn’t know that but sometimes when you are in the thick of life you can forget that every step you take, small as it may be, makes a difference. Especially with social media we see people achieving things and think man, she is so lucky or she makes it looks so easy or that happened over night! Then it’s easy to turn on ourselves about why we haven’t yet reached that goal. Trust me I get it and have done it! Today though, I was reminded that in those moments of getting down on ourselves we need to remember that they did not get there over night and it probably wasn’t easy.
Take weight loss for example, if you haven’t seen someone in a while and they lose a bunch of weight it can be easy to think wow that was fast. Reality though is probably that they have been working hard at it for a while. They have slipped up and eaten a whole bag of chips or stopped working out or were so exhausted they decided to just watch Netflix for a week. The thing is they started a journey and when the road got rocky or they fell down, they got back up again and kept going. That is how they achieved their goal!
Say you see someone who is finally following their dream of a new career. They are gaining momentum and really happy! Again, it’s easy to look at them and not see the late nights, the turmoil over what the right next move is, the hours of coaching and self examination (see what I did there? wink, wink). You don’t see the waves of questioning every choice and praying it all comes together but they too kept going through every bump.
It’s the little steps we take each day that get us to our goal. It’s all the times we fail and pick ourselves back up that make us stronger and more able to get farther down our path. My daffodils are beautiful and I have no idea what it took for them to reach that beauty from just a bulb. I do know they weathered a full winter, a bunch of chipmunks and a late frost that I was worried would kill them off. Yet, here they are! They are strong, hardy, beautiful and will keep coming back every year.
So next time you feel like you are never going to make it remember: Take it one step at a time. Pick yourself up when you fall. You grow stronger with each change. You grow more beautiful with each transition. Sow the seeds now so you can see your blooms next season!
