Resolutions (Continued)

I am writing this, beginning at 11:48. This is what I was talking about yesterday. It's very difficult to keep this shit up after this point, due to the laziness of the holidays. I find it unlikely that I will be able to finish this in time to truly say that I kept it up everyday, but I am going to try and do so regardless. That's the goal, and that's what I'm going to push myself to do. At the very least, I can say that I started this on the correct day, and that I tried. Fortunately I haven't started counting yet.

These things happen. It's why we set goals for ourselves. So that we have something to constantly be pushing towards, because even if we never make it to the end goal, we're still bettering ourselves along the way. I know this because I have never truly made it to a goal that I have set. I have gotten close many times, but I have always fallen short. But I am still a better man for having done so.

It may turn out by the end of 2015 that I go against that statement. I may make it to the end without missing a single day of writing. I find it unlikely, but it may happen. But realistically speaking, that's not the real goal that I'm trying to go for. My goal is to create a pattern for myself in which I write every day. I've said that before, but it's important that I keep it in mind. In theory, making it through a year with writing every single day should be far more than enough to establish a pattern. But it may not be so. I don't know. I've never particularly tried to establish a pattern before. I have patterns that I follow, surely, but I've never really consciously established them. Nor have I really tried.

All this is a new experience for me. But that is kind of the point of a resolution, after all. You're resolving yourself to do something new, different, exciting. Maybe two of those three, I don't know. But you're still trying to change something about yourself, ideally making it better. And you can't do that once and never do it again. You have to keep doing it, constantly, or else you fall short of becoming a better person. Being a good human being doesn't mean doing the right thing once when it matters. It means doing the right thing all the time, especially when it matters.

We all fall short of that. It's just how it is. But that doesn't truly make us bad. It just means that we have to keep trying. That's something that I have to remind myself a lot, to keep trying. It's so easy to look at your past mistakes and say that you're not worth anything and just let yourself fall flat on your face. But you have to keep going. You lose meaning and purpose if you just stop there. Great authors didn't write their best work and say "That's it, I'm done." They wrote their best work and said "This isn't good enough. I can do better." And they kept writing. They may have never lived up to that one high point, or they may have never finished the piece that was greater than anything they had ever written before. But that didn't mean they stopped.

It's easy to look at a person, define them by a single instance in their life, and never let anything else change that. We all do it. We do it daily. But we shouldn't. Just imagine how you would feel, do feel, when someone else does that to you. You're growing, you're changing, but they still see you as something you left behind you. It sucks. But you keep going, because they're not the one's that matter. You are.

We have to keep going. We have to push even when we think we can't do it. Because hey, you might start writing at 11:48 and still manage to finish what you were trying to write nine minutes later.