Yesterday afternoon, I took a long Sunday nap, and I had one of my recurring dreams that sometimes show up in one form or another on restless nights. In my dream, I was in a dingy gray train station (it looked more like a forgotten parking garage), and I was trying to get somewhere. I kept getting in the elevator to go to the platform where my train would be disembarking, but every time, I accidentally pressed the button for the wrong floor, or the elevator would be too full of people for me to reach the button, and so I always ended up in the wrong place. When I finally reached the platform, I tried climbing the ramps and stairs that I thought led up to my train, but they always took me somewhere else. It was like being trapped in an Escher print.
I’m not personally convinced that dreams always have meaning, but I do think that my brain picks up the bits and lint pieces and cast-offs of my day that are littered around my mind, and then tries to put it together in whatever way it can—like a kindergartener with a couple of pipe cleaners and too many glue sticks and nothing else to finish their art project. In this case, I think my poor brain’s source material came from a lingering sense of anxiety that occasionally rolls around when I feel like I’m not accomplishing the things I want to, or not getting to where I want to be with my projects and my goals.
On days like this, I find that it often helps me to look back at what I’ve already accomplished, rather than focusing on how far I still have to go. I once saw a pin on Pinterest that said something like, “Remember how hard you worked to get to where you are now.” (I don’t usually recommend going to Pinterest or any social media as a source of wisdom, but in this case, it worked out.)
Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the number of writing projects I still want to finish, I’m trying to remember how many I’ve already completed. It’s a much more encouraging thought than thinking of how far I still have to go. While I am a strong advocate for creating routines that help people to meet their goals, there will always be more to accomplish. That’s exciting in a lot of ways, but if we don’t ever take a moment to look backward, we can start to feel like we’re not making progress, when in reality, we are—we’re just growing, and so the goal keeps getting pushed back as we meet one goal, and then another.
So I guess the moral here is that if you feel like you’ve missed your train, remember that you’re already on it.
Jordan Radford Writes 