One day at a time

June 10th, 2023
Bellevue, WA

Recently saw this on a youtube video, and it felt like the right topic at the right time. There's been a lot going on in the last few months and been feeling overwhelmed. A lot of thoughts on the past and anxiety for the future. The quote "One day at a time" is a reminder to make small achievable goals, celebrate the short term sucessess, and quickly recover from short term failures.

“One step at a time..”

― Anonymous

Small achievable goals

I think the quote doesn't ignore the range of which we can hope and dream into the future. But to balance this with more present thinking and planning. It's been said that the future is hard to shape, so many factors and change can affect your plans it's really hard to have but a fuzzy broad goal or dream to move towards. By focusing in on the day-to-day, we are better able to take control of the shorter time range and set ourselves up for sucessess.

Celebrate the short term successess

Big long term wins feel great, they are the crowning achievement of many weeks or months, sometimes years, of hard work and intense dedication. How often do we have these wins? And what happens when we don't have them for a while? Again, I believe that "One day at a time" doesn't exclude the bigger and more impactful parts of life, but also the need to look closer at what is already in front of us. I often hear about the tip to getting a good day started is to "Make your bed", as a way to build up small win momentum in your day.

Quickly recover from short term failures

Sometimes in our super-human like lives, no matter how hard we fight and persevere, there are failures that we must deal with. Big failures and loss can have huge impact, these life events are unavoidable and is something we must take the time to grow and recover from. Similiarly, on a smaller scale, the smaller daily or weekly failures are things that we can quickly learn and grow from. These are going to be more abundent then the larger failures (hopefully!) and thus it's something that we should get better at navigating.

“Your journey begins with a single step. Each day, take one small step forward and soon you’ll find yourself miles away from where you started.”

― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (6th century BCE)

A lot of what I've summed up above, is kinda of a separation between large life things and the smaller more frequent things. The larger life things are heavy, impactful, and generally fewer. The smaller life things are almost on a daily basis and come and go with some level of control. This is where the overall concept of balance comes into play. How much should we focus on the larger things vs. the smaller things? By taking things "one day at a time", it's a call to bring ourselves to a focus on the present.

There can be a million things going on from our past and our future, that's fine, nothing wrong with that. But what requires most of our attention should be smaller chunks of time, attention, and life. By starting from this single step forward, each part of the journey will be built step-by-step.

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