#220 A reminder to decide

It’s about the way you say, “I’m tired, and I’m here anyway.”

It’s about the way you say, “I’m exhausted, I’m skipping this one, and that’s okay, because I’ll be back on track the next day.”

It’s about the way you say, “Come what may, I’m in this, and from my chosen path, I won’t be led astray.”

It’s about intentionality and elastic discipline.

It’s about direction.

Most of all, it’s about feeling good, not guilty.

What would you finally dare to do today
if you knew whatever you try will never be perfect anyway?

Publish a story with typos and awkward sentences?
Run a marathon without finishing it?
Play a guitar piece and trip up five times?
Sing in front of other people and miss a note?
Try a new yoga pose in class and fall over?

Nothing will be perfect today.
Nothing will be perfect tomorrow.

But if you take imperfect action
and dare to publish imperfect work
everything you do will have the perfect taste of progress and consistency.

And that’s all that counts anyway.

Learning a foreign language is both a frustrating and liberating experience.

We can focus on the frustration of not understanding the words the way we understand our mother tongue. Or we can realize that without the words, we are free to fall back on other ways of capturing and understanding meaning.

A crying baby can be soothed by words it does not yet understand, because she senses what’s behind the sounds, lets the meaningless melody cradle her to sleep…

Similarly, we don’t always have to know what’s behind the words, as long as we make an effort to understand the meaning behind the sounds.

Hearing a foreign language brings us back to that wordless world the way we experienced it as a newborn, before we tried so hard to put everything within and around us into language.

It makes us remember, there’s more to life than our words will ever allow us to express. And somehow, that’s a soothing thought.