Sunday, June 16, 2019

Oh No! I failed! I'm Such A Failure!

I don't have an ideal way to feel about the fact that I broke a commitment to myself yesterday by going to sleep without having published a blog post.  Friday and Saturday were kind of blurred together so the few times I thought of that commitment, I remembered posting on Friday morning, imagined "that takes care of today," and didn't think much more about it.  Now I see that I skipped yesterday.

This isn't the first time that I experienced making a mistake and then being tempted to use it to rationalize or justify giving up on the endeavor within which I made the mistake.  I like to think I don't really do that any more.  The value of committing to publishing a blog post every day for 30 days probably is not diminished by a failure like this one.  It just means that, to actually make good on the commitment, I have to do it for 13 "extra" days.

However, I did make a plan which was kind of a commitment that I haven't broken (yet),  to publish a chapter of my cyborg story each Sunday.  I don't like that "yet" either, but sometimes a failure is a win on a deeper and/or more important level. Also, it's a good idea to do the best you can even if the evidence shows that you didn't do it the way you said you would do it.  So this is yesterday's blog, which I had to wait until today to publish so that the title would make sense.  It was not intentional.  Maybe, subconsciously, it was intentional, if there is such a thing as "subconscious intent."

Take your mistakes in stride.  Don't get egotistical and pretend it wasn't a mistake.  I probably do that sometimes, but I try to avoid it.  We're only human, after all.  Or are we dancer?

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