The First Step

Leads to…
The next step…

We live on top of a steep hill in Sonoma, CA. For exercise, we drive all the way down the hill, leave the car, and walk back up. It’s 2.8 miles and takes about 50 minutes at a good pace. It’s no walk in the park. It’s work getting up that hill. When my sister-in-law from Sweden was visiting this summer and we took her on the “walk”. She didn’t think she could make it up. My daughter Audrey gave her some sound advice. “Just look down and pretend the ground is flat and put one foot in front of the other and keep going.” Put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Turns out to work quite well! If you look ahead at the long climb in front of you, it can be overwhelming and you long for a car to pick you up and drive you up. But, if instead, you look at your next footstep, it becomes a walk in the park!

This advice works well when faced with a huge project… or any project for that matter. Just take the next step in front of you and keep going. Often if you try to take in the whole project, you can get overwhelmed and end up going nowhere fast. But if you just do the next right step, you are on your way. It’s breaking the project down into bite-sized chunks and whittling away at it that gets it done.

Remember that garage project I told you about? Cleaning out our garage that had stuff from 4 houses/apartments stored in it? It was completely overwhelming to me! I wanted to curl up on the sofa and read a murder mystery and avoid the whole thing. But we broke it down. Ten boxes at a time. Sure, it took a long time (all year!) but hey! Now it’s almost done! 20 boxes left! I could have played the ostrich game and not faced it, but now that huge weight is lifted and this year when we come to the ranch we can relax instead of having to continue to worry about all those boxes. Small continuous steps in the right direction.

Here is a funny old clip singing the song about one foot in front of the other! Have a great week! Alicia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OORsz2d1H7s

If that doesn’t work, try copying and pasting. The internet is not working up here in outer Mongolia…