Since I stopped driving to work I’ve become very aware of my feet. It takes a while to get used to walking 8-10 miles per day when you had grown used to walking 2-3 miles on an average day. Your feet, and the rest of your body need to adapt. Your feet may get some blisters at first, then they will develop callouses to better handle the task, and soon that walking is no longer as taxing as it seemed at first.

This is true for anything begin either anew, or after a prolonged hiatus. And it is just as true when this change is beneficial or necessary for us. We human beings seem to be excellent examples of Newton’s laws of motion. We are resistant to change, and when faced with it, it often takes multiple attempts before we find ourselves successful. We often need repeated pushes, the first moving is a bit, the second a bit easier, and after a few more we might be able to keep going. For others it can be much more difficult if it’s achieved at all. Change, for some, might seem a task reminiscent of Sisyphus and his stone.

I recall a very dear friend who suffered with addictions to alcohol and cigarettes. She was able to overcome her addiction to alcohol, and although she knew that the cigarettes were destroying her lungs, she couldn’t let them go. We had many conversations about this. She told me many times that she wanted to quit but couldn’t. The truth was that her desire to quit wasn’t sufficient to overcome that addiction. Like Sisyphus, each day when she pushed the stone of desire up the hill, the stone of addiction rolled back down and she found herself smoking again. My friend was not a weak person; she had overcome much in her life, but for some reason she couldn’t take the steps in her life that would enable her to live smoke-free. She couldn’t take the steps that would let her live. And the saddest part was that she knew this.

We all face challenges and nobody escapes life without experiencing some amount of trauma. This is why I chose Emily Autumn’s song One Foot in Front of the Other for today’s post. She asks, as we all do, so many questions when faced with one trouble and difficulty after another, but answers each of these with action placing one for in front of the other, taking each next step on the road to something better.

None of us were presented with guarantees when we entered this world; some of us were handed decidedly raw deals. Some of us were born in war torn regions, in parts of the world lacking in resources, into loveless families, as orphans, into poverty, some are born addicted to drugs. We do not choose this, but it is our starting point. Our job is to make, step by step, something of the life we were given. We are like architects  builders, carpenters. We begin with our life,which is the job site. We discover our talents, our dreams, our hopes, our wishes, along with our limitations and dislikes; these become our design criteria. And then we begin, usually in our twenties, construction. For some of us this means making a career, a family, or a home. Some choose a religious vocation. Some wander. Some don’t choose until much later in life.

Building that life, or rebuilding it, requires steady work, focus, and dedication. Caring and wise counsel from dedicated friends and family can be especially helpful, as can spiritual advice from trustworthy religious leaders. But you are the architect and lead contractor; this is your life and you are responsible for it in it’s entirety. The grand part about that is also the scary part; the success or failure, your ultimate joy or sorrow, is up to you. But here yet again lies another secret: most people who fail needn’t have done so. Many of us set our sights too high and deem ourselves failures for not achieving unattainable goals. Sometimes this comes from parents who demand perfection, but whatever the reason, measuring your worth by whether or not you are the best at something is ultimately pointless. It can give us something to brag about for a time, it can give us an ego boost, but there are very few records that will never be broken. We are unlikely to be the best at anything for very long.

If we wish to be happy and satisfied, if we wish to overcome our trauma, to eliminate our suffering, then we need to look at goal setting in a different way. I’ll use what I’m doing here as an example.

I could have said that I want to have a blog site that is top rated and able to support me financially within a year, and if I can’t do that, I’m a failure. That’s unrealistic, and I would likely fail if that was my goal. On the other hand, I can say that my short term goal is to produce a daily post that some people might find interesting enough to read. From there, I can start building this site, adding links to people I trust, building connections. I can register a trade name and have the blog as part of a business and when I publish my next book, I can use my own imprint, and I can help others who wish to publish – either to self publish, or if it’s a good fit, to publish with my imprint. And the measure of success will be the people that are helped, the lives made just a bit better. But what I do will be done, as Emily Autumn put it, but putting One foot in front of the other foot in front of the one fooot…

If you’re reading threes morning musings and they are helping you, or giving you something to think about, then I’m doing my job. I can say that today was a success!