“Sometimes the Victory is that you Just Keep Trying”

This is has been my life motto for close to a decade now.  I remember having this idea dawn on me during a relief society lesson in church where we were talking about addictions.  I was thinking about how powerful addictions were and that if people tried (and failed) to overcome addictions, they were still better off than someone who wasn’t trying at all.  But that failure often makes you think that you’re no good, you’re weak, you’re worthless because you couldn’t keep it up.  You failed, you gave in.  But maybe you were sober for 3 months.  That’s three months of victory that you wouldn’t otherwise have.  And if you give in and start back over again, that changes your character.  And as your character continues to change over time hopefully you will eventually overcome.  But even if you don’t, you’re still better off for having given the effort to keep on trying.

And of course that applied to so much in my life, too.  I may not be addicted to drugs but I have plenty of other vices and habits and weaknesses that I keep failing at.  One that is always at the forefront of my thoughts is that I cannot seem to keep my house clean.  I’ve never been able to do it.  And it has caused me so much anguish over the years.

But recently I’ve been looking at all my facebook memories and in trying to prepare my last post, I was searching all through my previous blog’s decade-worth of entries and one of the repeating themes that I kept seeing over and over was all the food I was trying to make and how hard I was working to clean things up again.  Post after post after post.  There were a lot of successes I was posting about!  It’s true that they didn’t last.  I never made yummy, gourmet meals for my family every night and had it on the table by 6pm unfailingly.  But I sure have kept trying.  And over a decade that really adds up to a lot of nice meals.  And although I have never been able to keep the house clean consistently, there were also plenty of days in there where I gave it my all and really tried to catch up.  I never did quite catch up really.  Things weren’t perfect.  But I know that things were better for that effort than if I had never given any effort at all.

Or even look at exercising.  I wish I was the kind of person who had spent the past decade working out consistently.  But I am not.  I started and stopped jazzercised so many times, depending on our schedule and budget.  I have played basketball and not played basketball, volleyball and not volleyball.  I have run and stopped running and then run again.  I really wish I had consistently been running for a decade.  Imagine what I’d look like and how I’d feel right now if I had?  On the other hand, I completed a half marathon and ran a total of 11.5 miles!  I’ve learned a lot about myself.  And while I haven’t always been consistent, I’m much better off for all the times I started and tried than if I had just spent the past decade doing nothing at ll.

It was actually really inspiring to scroll through years and years of my life and see just how much effort I was putting forth on a weekly basis.  Failing and getting up and trying again.

Victory.