“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.” — Aldous Huxley

This week has been stressful, because there were no pleasing leaps forward, only a steady slog through the frenzy of a busy life. None of that frenzy matters as much as the act of taking the next step forward in our essential work, and then (if we don’t stumble into the abyss) the next step after that. We must learn to stop skipping ahead to that dark place of overwhelm. To try to move a mountain all in one shove will only leave us gasping in a puddle of failure. Try one pebble at a time and soon we’re making progress.

We know this and yet we still feel the scale of the larger goal pressing down upon us. In the middle of a long row I thought to myself momentarily, can I sustain this pace for the entire time I’ve committed to? I saw my split waiver for a stroke or two, while I reminded myself that the only thing that mattered was the next stroke, not the one 40 minutes from now. I ended up with a PR for the year just by staying out of my own head one stroke at a time. When we stop playing mind games with ourselves about the future and our place in it, we get back to the essential work of now.

Progress is uncomfortable. We feel the discomfort in our own change as we make it, and we feel discomfort when we feel we’re falling behind the changes around us, prodding us to move faster in our own development. The only thing to do is accept the discomfort as a necessary tax of forward motion. We know that change can be infuriatingly incremental. Stop looking so far ahead and we won’t get tripped up by the task right in front of us. This next task is all that really matters anyway. One pebble at a time.