Category: Reflection

“Desiderata,” by Max Ehrmann (1927)

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Wandering through the Presidio National Park in San Francisco, and overlooking the San Francisco National Cemetery. Each and every human, past, present and future: You are all loved. 

Desiderata (Latin: “desired things”), is a 1927 poem by American writer Max Ehrmann (1872–1945). It’s one of my favorites. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Sometimes I can sit and chew on each of these sentences a couple of times, soak them in.

Desiderata.

“Go placidly amidst the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its shams, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.”

Much love,

Chasing Freedom: Independence, Adventure, and The Year-Long Secret Race to #WDS

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

INDEPENDENCE. WHAT IS IT?

A year ago, I went to one of my first conferences I’ve ever attended—aptly titled, “The World Domination Summit.“ (Try telling your parents and your colleagues about this one. Bemused looks and strange faces ensued.) I went anyways. As a slightly more introverted than extroverted person who struggles a bit with social anxiety and large groups of people, I wasn’t sure about meeting all of these new faces, or being part of a crowd. (There’s a reason I spent the majority of my childhood swimming, gardening, or reading–all solo activities. While I’ve shifted in my twenties and become much more of an outgoing person over time, I still find the solace of writing and blogging to be much more rejuvenating than large crowds of people.) In short, I don’t always like going out in public. I was especially terrified because aside from one or two people, I didn’t know anyone, and I didn’t have a wingman.

At the conference, I met some of the most remarkable people I’ve encountered, from Nate, who was walking across America, to Nick, a fellow swimmer and comrade in adventures in New York, to JD, who has taught me so much: In one weekend, I made more friends and found kindred souls than the years spent in various jobs. The recap of the event took four separate posts (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Photos) – and Chris joked that I should become the “scribe” of future conferences because of my note-taking obsession.

This weekend, I’ll be returning to round 2 of the World Domination Summit (#WDS), as both a participant and a workshop leader. But even more than that, I’m excited because a secret year-long race is now coming to a closing point …

Because a year ago, I met three people who joined me in a secret race, and we made a pact that by this time, this year, we would all take strides towards creating freedom and big changes in our lives. Continue reading “Chasing Freedom: Independence, Adventure, and The Year-Long Secret Race to #WDS”

The Never-Ending Curiosity of a 5-Year Old: Why, How? What? and Why?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Why?

Why-why-why-why-why?

My brain is like a 5-year old, and up until recently, it was like an over-caffeinated 5-year old without a chance to get outside and run around on the playground. I find myself fixated on the WHY question, as well as the WHAT and the HOW, and I can’t help but wonder, about, well, everything.

In no particular order, questions that dart in and out of my mind:

Writing, Documentation, Blogging

How To Make a Difference

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

No one cares about your ideas. They care about what you do with those ideas.

Figure out how things work. Figure out why things are the way they are. Learn like crazy, and never stop.

Learn how and where you can make changes. If the structure isn’t working, ask yourself why: Is it the people? The assumptions? The processes? The philosophies? What can be changed? (Everything can be changed).

Look at all the things that you can change, and pick the one with the most impact. Where will your energy be most useful? Focus on repeatable, incremental change.

Do it. Do it consistently. Don’t give up when you hit roadblocks. Persevere.

Keep going.

Repeat.

How Can I Be Better?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

How can I be better?

Nearly every day, this is a question I struggle with.

Today is impermanent, imperfect, temporary.

We can always be better. 

What will you focus on? How can you get better?

I write every week, almost every day, in an effort to become a better and better writer. Jack London, in his letter to an aspiring writer, cuts to the chase with some (brutal) feedback that many of us (as un-edited, free-publishing internet writers) need to hear.

Feedback is when information about the past influences your present and future actions. As Jenny Blake writes, Feedback is Career Currency: learn to love it.

In a recent review, I asked my bosses to give me the brutal truth: Feedback will sting for a few days, but worse yet is staying the same for the next forty years without improving your craft.

Take the feedback for the long term.

It’s hard to ask for it, but it’s unbelievably worth it.

How can you be better?

How can I be better?

What you don’t see.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

What you see is not all there is

It’s late on a Saturday night, and I feel a slight pull to go out, to put down my notebooks, to wander outside and do the “going out” thing I sometimes like to do. I feel the tug, the urge to walk down to the local bars, to surround myself with crowds of other people, drinking, dancing, playing.

It’s what everyone else is doing, I think to myself. You don’t have to be writing or working right now. It’s not normal. I shake my head at that thought for a second, struggling with this idea of  “normal.”

What’s normal? What’s typical? How often does it change?

The funny thing is, even when I go out at night, put the dress on, find myself shaking, talking, bars crawling, people laughing, music pounding, dancing, heavy music reverberating… I still wonder. Is this it? Is this what there is? Is the extent of what’s possible? Are my only two options staying in, or going out? Is there something I’m missing, something else I’m not seeing?

The visual is limited, deceptive, yet it strangely beckons me. Everyone is doing this, I think. When I’m out, all I see are all the other people going out; I see the action and the activity. What I don’t see, however, is everything else.

What I don’t see right in front of me are the people at home, preparing for bed, watching movies, slowly unraveling from their days. People surrounding the dinner table, laughing; casual conversations. People at home, working late, start-ups, built over time; writers, pouring over books. Philosophers, musing over ideas. Yogis stretching in and out of another day of activity. Writers spending time behind the books, dreaming. Hustlers working four different jobs, filling their late Saturday nights with the tips from behind a counter, building a freedom fund to travel the world.

People, doing.

As I watch and wander, wondering about what it is that people do, I see the fallacy of vision, the limitations of judging the world merely by what we see: what we see is not all that there is.

Perception is not reality, although it readily distorts it.

What we know and understand to be true comes from our past experiences and from what we’re able to observe about what others do. We clue into Facebook for this reason: to see and be seen, to hear and be heard, to keep tabs on the people around us, to see what they’re doing. But this reality-distortion field, if you will, is based on the collective assumption that we’re each reporting our lives accurately. And we’re not. We can’t possibly be. The act of editing, processing, and determining what to share filters our collective report into the most interesting, unique, or share-worthy status. I’m going to guess that collectively, Facebook posts are more heavily skewed towards the extrovert, towards the person inclined to share, and towards the posts related to exploration, adventure, vacation, food, and friends. In short, everything I want to be doing. That is, Facebook is inherently biased. The system of “liking” creates a slow but consistent classical conditioning that primes each of us to post content that generates feedback, or to be, well, interesting.

The number of pictures I take of myself working, behind a desk, hiding behind my pajamas and thick writer’s glasses? Disproportionately smaller than the amount of time I spend behind my pens, paper and books.

Just like on Saturday night, or any night, or on the collective digital over-share of online social media, there’s a whole world of more, of things we don’t hear about and don’t see. The invisible.

Just because you see something happening one way doesn’t mean you, too, are obligated to do it. Call it the face of peer pressure, but you don’t need to do something–have sex, build a start-up, be successful by thirty–because everyone on television or in your local sphere appears to be doing so. You don’t need to dress fancy, or be extroverted, or drink extensively. You’re allowed to be different. To follow your bliss. To do what matters to you. And just because you don’t see something happening doesn’t mean there aren’t alternatives to what you’ve already seen.

The older I get, the more I learn to unpack and listen to the quiet power of my inner voice coaching me, telling me what to do, guiding me away from the pull of the collective, the pull of “normal.”

What is normal? Who defines it? Isn’t normal an idea defined by the average of what everyone else is doing? I’m not certain that I want to be average, or better yet, do what everyone else is doing.

Some evenings I get home and the bones in my body ache to move, my muscles tell me that despite the cultural normalcy that declares our collective culture sit still behind desks and overeat massive quantities of bread and potatoes, I have to firmly disagree, eating handfuls of lettuce and kale and lose myself in the fluidity of space. I spent years trying to quash this compulsion to move, and I’m tired of it. I can’t. I’m embarrassed only that it took me so long to recover my “essential self,” and be okay with dancing and wandering in streets to the tune of my body, as opposed to the tune of a giant cacophony of internalized social expectations. And so, I put on my tired and worn-thin running clothes and start out on the streets of San Francisco to wander a city in my feet, in my body, lost in my mind, lost in ideas. My words and thoughts tumble over the pavement, reverberating between the building spaces, dancing in the open spaces of our city systems, playing within the loose rule-sets that guide them, challenging each other, challenging me.

Other times, my body craves the warm solitude of being amidst of a crowd of quiet people, a coffee shop reverie with late night candles and the option to be alone, by myself.

And then, still again, some times I find myself craving a great shake-off, a dance, an agglomeration of people and bodies and warm dancing, the crowded room of bodies stinging with sweat, salt appearing on my skin through sweat and exertion, hips shaking in rhythm to the beat of dance music, throbbing, laughing, shaking off the cacophony of thought just to be. And then, I go out. I engage. I dance.

What do you need to do to be you?

Some people work late in the evenings to finish classes, to gain expertise, to chart a new path in a direction tangential to their primary occupation. I remember stories from one of my relatives about the evenings spent getting her teaching credential post-work, and how difficult, yet rewarding, it was to spend the time for a year to make a new opportunity for herself.

It’s true in the social space, too. Our “Facebook world” is designed to share the accomplishments, the awards, and in aggregate you can feel overwhelmed by the sea of information. Sometimes it seems like everyone else is going on magnificent vacations, having babies, getting married, or winning a Pulitzer prize.

What you don’t see, however, in the compression of space that the internet proffers, are the years and years behind each of those plans, the sacrifices made in exchange for the work put forward. The money spent on the time off. The years spent writing the books. The hours spend alone behind a guitar, learning, string by string and chord by chord, how to map the sequence of rhythms and sounds into your fingers until your body knew it so well your mind forgot the need to think about it and it just became a part of who you were.

In an online conversation with a friend about the difference between achievement and doing, he said,

“In general, I’ve found that our minds are trained extremely well by schools, parents and society such that we can develop a mental concept of excellence faster than we can embody it. I can totally see myself in my head acting a scene at Academy-Award winning levels but to actually bring that into my body will take a lifetime of work and improvement. So there is this perpetual gap between what we think is excellent and what we can actually communicate. With not just acting, most other things too. I fear with the Internet and social networking, we will only get further and further away from actually embodying and experiencing and more into discussing, abstracting and conceptualizing.”

Doing takes time, effort, repetition, quiet exertion, solitude, and sometimes, invisibility. The space to practice. The space to dream, explore, be, and do. 

It takes years, years, years, and practice, practice, practice to get to the place where you’re doing something in the way that you are shaped and primed to do.

What are you doing that no one else sees?

What other options are there? You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. The world needs you to be weird. Or better yet, to be you.  

Not what you think you ought to be. 

Just… you.

What’s Your Story?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

You. 

On the cover of a magazine.

Big, bold, splashy words. You’re wearing something sharp. Five years down the road from now, you’re doing an exclusive interview, and someone is telling your story to a captive audience.

Just a few questions for you, in this daydream:

First, what magazine would it be?

Second, what would the headline say about you or your project?

And, more importantly, what would the article be about?

In the last trip I took to Costa Rica with a group of women entrepreneurs, Allie Siarto led a series of small-group discussions by posing a question and asking us each to explore the answers.

An entrepreneur who co-founded LoudPixel and works as a photographer on weekends, Allie is one of my peer heroes, someone who I can look to as a model for creating and changing the way work is done and how we think about inventing your career. In asking this question, she asked us to consider what our future story looked like.

What’s your story?

This question looks at three important components of your story. This exercise tells you a lot about your project, career and personal vision.

First, it tells you who your audience is and what the size of your target market is. If you’re looking to be on the cover of a niche specialty magazine, your target market is much smaller than a mainstream publication such as Time or The New Yorker. That’s fine. It’s your community or market, and it’s not going to be the same for everyone. Inc Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fast Company are some of my favorites–and yet these are still specialized, target groups that not everyone is interested in.

Second, it tells you what arena you want to play in; who your peers are, and what sort of work you’d be doing. In one of the magazines I regularly read, Landscape Architecture Magazine gives me a good idea of who my peer group is. Flipping to the table of contents, checking out the authors, and taking a look at the credits (from editors to the national group), tells me the people I’m looking to learn from, compete against, work with, and share professional accreditation and acknowledgement with.

And third, this exercise prompts you to paint the story of yourselves after success. Akin to creating a vision map for where you want to go, you get to create your story backwards by understanding what your future success looks like.

Take a minute to dream…

What would your headline be? What would they say about you? Put your dreamer’s hat on, and picture yourself in five  years’ time. The projects you are working on currently, invisibly, are noticed. You’ve put them in the world, you’ve constructed something long-term that has added up to something. Maybe your recipes are featured on a local cooking magazine. Or your crochet projects are a photographic spread in a crafts magazine. Or your teaching is covered in the regional papers.

Maybe you’re a hero, and you’ve saved someone’s life on the street, rescuing them from the dangers on an oncoming car, and you get 15 minutes showcasing your brilliance.

What would they say about you?

What do you want to be known for?

Write your story in advance. Picture yourself in 5 or 10 years’ time, and write the article. I’m doing it now; I’ve actually just finished a 5000-word outline and draft of a feature article that I’d love to have put on the cover of one of my favorite magazines.

What would the story be about?

How would the story change the lives of other people? What would you have done that makes a difference?

The act of visualizing this storyline is one powerful exercise. Knowing what you want to achieve, and what’s important to you, and what excites you can give you cause to work hard during the days beforehand. It helps you prioritize what you do and don’t do. It gives you a way to layer each piece of your life together towards a goal.

If you’re daring enough, write the article. Don’t be intimidated about the awkwardness of writing about yourself, or the weirdness of it–get over that. Take a piece of paper, cast off the shadows of doubt, and indulge in your fantasy for a few minutes. Write the best version of yourself, tell the story of what beautiful things you’ve done, and really be proud of yourself for the accomplishments that you’ve achieved.

Taking the time to dream is powerful. Taking the time to carve out your thoughts about who you are and what you want to become is one of the first tools you can engage in on the way to getting there.

What’s your headline?

You Gotta Slow Down to Speed Up

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

But with all this speed, we start wobbling. Making mistakes. Not seeing where we’re actually going.

And too often, I see entrepreneurs and business owners prioritize speed over depth. Is it better to go fast, or to go far?

Speed and consistency are two separate things, and one more often than not is indicative of success. To be successful, you have show up.

The irony of going far is that it’s not done by going fast, not necessarily.

Sometimes you have to slow down in order to truly speed up.

And sometimes, you need to rest.

Sometimes you gotta slow down to speed up.

It’s not about going fast.

Think about in sports, or running training. Your actual time spent running isn’t the bulk of your training. Equally important is your recovery time, how you fuel yourself, stretching, preparing, mental work, etc.

You don’t prepare for a marathon by running non-stop for two weeks and then racing.

Preparation takes time, consistency, and adequate and ample rest. Without rest, recovery, and repair, we drive our muscles into damage and injury.

Take that analogy to your project, your brain, your work. Do you get enough rest?

We need rest to go fast.
We need time off between our work sessions.
We need to recover.

Because to go fast or far, you also need to know how to control the speed.

Why Do Cars Have Brakes?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

“The more sure we are, the more likely we are to suffer an illusion.” – Jerry Weinberg

Why do automobiles have brakes?

To stop, right?

To stop. That’s one answer.

Is there another answer? I heard this on the radio recently, and I jotted it down in my mental notebook.

Cars have brakes so they can go fast.

It’s the ability to stop quickly that allows us to travel at speeds much faster than if we didn’t have brakes.

Without brakes, we’d all drive very, very slowly. Brakes give us flexibility in stopping when you want, where you want, and how you want.

Analogously, in your life it’s the very presence of boundaries that create new freedoms. Freedom isn’t free. (Similarly paradoxical, having choice isn’t what helps us in decision-making.) Having a gas pedal isn’t what enables you to go fast. It’s having a gas pedal AND a brake pedal.

Sometimes the short-term sacrifices in our lives are actually enabling us to achieve long-term goals. Your brakes are helping you go faster, even if it’s frustrating to stop at the stop sign.

Also to note: how you answered this question clues you into how your brain operates when thinking about actions, functions, and relationships among systems. Thinking that brakes brake; and that’s all, is a limited view on the capability of a function in a system. Often, each action or movement has multiple effects in the system.

How can you train your brain to look again and see if you can find other answers? It’s very Jerry Weinberg (author of An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.)

The next time you do something, ask yourself how it works. And ask yourself, is that the only thing happening here?

Probably not.

So, why do cars have brakes?

“The boundary of one thing is often the beginning of another” – Leonardo

I is for Integrity.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I was asked to write about Integrity as part of Molly Mahar’s “Blog Crawl” on self-love this February. Today’s post is part of Stratejoy’s The ABC’s of Self Love Blog Crawl + Treasure Hunt. Molly’s series is part of her bigger program called The Fierce Love Course. I had a chance to meet with Molly in San Diego last fall and see her amazing work first-hand, and I was delighted to be picked to post as part of this series.

I is for Integrity.

“Integrity is not achieved, attained, or accomplished. Integrity, like character, is built through quiet persistence, a structural consistency in all that you say, do, and believe.” 

“To have integrity is to believe fully in your soul, and your being. It is to act in accordance with yourself, and accept nothing less.”

Continual Motion.

I’m sweating. Breathing hard. I’ve got my leg over my shoulder, and my knee is creaking. My hand is slipping, slowly, against the rubbery mat surface and I can hear seventeen other students also breathing hard. I’m trying to get into a new space, move towards a new pose in my yoga class, and I can’t figure out if I’m going to be able to get there today. Leftover alcohol and chlorine equally permeate my sweat, and I curse having spent a week and a half doing nothing – why didn’t I say in shape? – I mutter. I forget it, letting the thought slide out of my brain easily. I’m here now. This is good. This feels good. But bad. Good lord, does this feel bad. Awful in a stretching, pulling kind of way. Unglamorous.

I drop my head, lifting my left hand quickly off the mat to wipe sweat from my face. Drops fall from my face to the mat, making it more slippery, less sticky. Damn.

And my leg slides, centimeters, stretching again, and all of a sudden I can point my toes. I feel it, a balanced, taught centeredness, muscles working together. My hands are aligned below me, my chest is centered squarely above me, my bones stacking neatly, my legs pointing towards opposite walls.

It’s graceful, but exertion doesn’t stop. Sweat keeps dripping. I’m still moving. I’m either working towards the pose or relaxing, dropping from it.

Movement, the teacher intones. It’s all about movement. You’re constantly moving, constantly shifting, always realigning and re-centering.

Yes.

“Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.”

Commitment.

We made a commitment at the beginning of class, a small devotion to ourselves and our practice, and we chose a phrase or a word to stick to for the night. A set of words to recall when our brains freeze in mindless chatter, when our thoughts dart outside of the room and into the future or past, worrying needlessly about all things could-have and should-have and might-have and would-have. The words bring our loose cannons back to alignment, briefly, like five-year-olds in a small class, restlessly bopping about while waiting for lunchtime.

My commitment, my word, my phrase – how do I pick a word? I mused over independence, over writing, over being, over gratitude. My frazzled brain did it again, tumbling through a thousand thoughts, looking for a life-line and a mantra to relax into. Words float in: blessings, health, kindness, of being kind and grateful for everything, of releasing the relentless pressure I build up in myself to achieve and to do and to be. And then I my mind, like my body, stumbles onto a phrase that settles nicely in my mind, a gentle kindness that pulls towards a longer form of being, an integrity. “Move towards,” the voice told me: “Move towards your goals. Move towards integrity.”

Movement, this idea, resonates: there’s no need for a valiant, chest-puffing stake in the ground, a moment in time that says, I WILL DO THIS! As though now that I have shouted it, it is and it will be! (Insert multiple exclamation points). It is quieter, more peaceful, more consistent. It’s a set of actions, a layered being, a nuanced commitment to yourself over time.

Moving towards integrity.

“Character is not what you say, it is not what you boast. It is what you do when no one is watching.”

What is integrity? 

Integrity is knowing what you stand for. It is showing consistency in your actions and having a soundness of moral character. Integrity is doing what you say you’re going to do, even when no one is watching.

Integrity is being accountable to yourself.

In buildings, structural integrity means that the building will stand up – that the components, the joints, the system at play is sound and built well; that it won’t deteriorate or break down over time. It is a consistency and standard of excellence in engineering.

Some definitions include “the state of being unimpaired; soundness,” or another: “the quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness.”

 “ You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do” – Henry Ford

For me, integrity is living up to my expectations of myself. It’s upholding both my thoughts and actions; it’s  behaving my best, even during the worst situations. It’s going to the gym, even if I don’t want to, because I made a commitment to myself. It’s planning ahead, giving someone grace when it’s due, it’s standing up for myself, it’s for chasing after your dreams even if no one else knows what you are up to. It’s believing in yourself and your dreams, and holding yourself accountable for acting in accordance with the best that you can be.

The opposite is also true.

We’ve all screwed up. Royally, beautifully, messily, fantastically. If we were perfect already, I suppose that would be boring. We mess up. We’re human. The difference is in how you decide to behave. What you choose to do before, during, afterwards. Whether or not you are capable of repairing a situation.

Integrity is not a stake in the ground. It’s not a goal that’s achieved. It’s a consistency of action, over time, that builds in what you say, believe, and do.

You’ve probably encountered situations where someone or something lacked integrity.

Perhaps it was you.

I’ve been there.

Last year, in Paris, traveling with my sister, I found one (of many) weaknesses in my character through exploring new settings, circumstances, and places. In particular, I found I had to question my ability to make decisions and what I thought was true about myself. I got beautifully, horribly conned in Monte Martre, duped into doing something, and I was rattled by the change in my behavior in the given context. More alarming than losing dozens of Euros was the red glaring flag hitting itself loudly against my conscience:

Do I really make good decisions? Am I what I think I am? Or am I actually just all talk? I babbled as such to my sister as we walked up to the top of the Sacre Coure, wondering how I could have wandered down a spiral of decision points that led to very silly—and alarming—behaviors.

Yet all was not lost: dissonance is good. Dissonance reminds us when our behaviors and actions aren’t in line with what we believe to be true about ourselves. Moments of discomfort tell us when we’re not behaving in accordance with who we truly are. The act of testing, of being, of doing–these are the moments that matter.

You’re not perfect. You’ll mess up. I’ve found that time and again, I test my integrity and sometimes fall short. Each time, I have to stop and analyze, wondering: what am I? Is this what I want to be? Do I like this?

Why does it matter?

Does it matter? You can brush it under the rug, sweep it away, think, “Oh Sarah, who cares!” – but it matters. It’s not about what other people think, say or believe about you.

At the end of the day, you’re the one that has to live with you. You’re there when you wake up, when you breathe, when you think, when you act.

I’m the one who has to sleep with myself at night; I’m the one who wakes up when I can’t stand how I’ve behaved; I’m the one who runs away from my emotions at times. It’s all just me.

And at the end of the day, if you don’t stand up for yourself, who will?

If you don’t do what you say you will—not for anyone else, but for yourself—then you lose trust in yourself. If you can’t keep your own word to yourself, and do what it is that you say you’re going to do, then what good is your word?

“Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.” –David Star Jordan

What does integrity look like? What does it feel like?

“I never had a policy. I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.” – Abraham Lincoln 

The things I’m proudest of aren’t the big goals, the declarations, the accomplishments. They are perpetual works of art, things I’m continuing to move towards. A quiet integrity, the knowledge that each action is cumulative, and that with each effort, exertion, breathe and stance, I’m working towards becoming what I say I want to become.

And from yoga, standing next, upright with my leg straight out, foot held in my hand, my upper thigh quivering with tension, my hamstrings stretched to their maximum, my opposite leg shaking silently in exertion. This is the act of standing, of balancing, an act of perpetual motion. Of persistent strain. Of forces, acting in opposition, continual moving back and forth against each other.

Tracy Chapman plays in the background: “… All you have is your soul,” she sings, deep and rich. She’s right. You’re all you’ve got. You know what you are capable of. And you know when you don’t live up to what you could be.

The most beautiful poses in yoga, in life, in being–are actually those of endless motion, of shifting and moving and realigning. Even in the long stretches, the folds and the bends, the fibers in our muscular systems shift and lengthen, releasing millimeters, day by day, until one day we wake up with our face against our knees and wonder,

Well, shit.

How did I get here?  

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This post is part of Molly Mahar of Stratejoy’s “Blog Crawl” for self-love this February. Find out more about The ABC’s of Self Love Blog Crawl + Treasure Hunt here. Check out the previous authors and their thoughts on self-love, here:  

The ABC’s of Self-Love:

A is for Acceptance by Molly Mahar: “Luckily, accepting who I am is more than embracing my (gorgeous, quirky, messy) imperfections. It’s also about celebrating my strengths, admiring my awesome, appreciating my honor.”

B is for Beauty by Rebecca Bass-Ching: “I now revel in the awe-inspiring beauty of courage, generosity, gentleness, kindness, sacrificial love, compassion, vulnerability, motherhood and respect.”

C is for Celebration by Dani: “Stand in front of the mirror and point out all the things you love about yourself. Instant self-love!”

D is for Determination by Ash Ambirge: “Want success? Make more decisions, choose more often, gain more control, and then take responsibility over your success. Period.” 

E is for Enough by Amy Kessel:“The resistance to loving ourselves disappears when we know, really know, that we are enough.”

F is for Freedom by Jenny Blake: “A fallacy of freedom is that we must not allow ourselves to be tied-down, lest we lock the cage on our ability to fly.”

G is for Growth by Justine Musk:  “It’s how you grow through and out of it – the meaning you make of it – that can not only shape yourself and your creative work (and your life) — but inspire others.”

H is for Honoring by Randi Buckley: “The deepest honor in the name of self-love shines light onto the whispers in the heart.”