Tag Archives: failure

I regularly talk about how we need little successes in life. I believe it. And yet sometimes when things get really intense for me, I find myself guilty of ignoring those little successes, not taking the time to acknowledge them as I should and their importance to me, to my family, to my causes. Sometimes I can get so focused on the end goal that I do not always let myself celebrate the micro-moments. You’ve heard me talk about these before, and how those little successes are blessings. But I’ve been guilty of missing them too. And if I’m to practice gratitude, it means I need to be grateful for everything. I’m ashamed to say I’m not always. And of late, it’s been my family who has had to deal with it.

It was spring break last week and we had two narrow misses with my kids and the ER. True blessings. But admittedly, when the plumbing decided to go too, and during our efforts to fix it I ended up sprayed with raw sewage, I could not think of anything but the fact that the week was turning out awful. And my mind was focused on the resulting failure to hit the marks I had planned for the week or catch up on the things I needed to. Everything was wrong.

However, the week wasn’t truly awful. In spite of work plans and goals not being reached during this break, a lot of (albeit unplanned) good things happened. Still, for a while I was pretty much only conscious of the excrement that had uprooted everything, and the final physical reality of it punctuated the feelings that had been growing all week. That nothing was going right and everything had gone to ____. It wasn’t true.

The plumbing is fixed now, the fridge has been replaced, my son didn’t lose an eye and my daughter didn’t have appendicitis. Oh, and on the appendicitis after all the tests – it was merely something harmless that 10 years ago they didn’t have the technology to see.  And thank goodness for modern medicine not being 10 years behind, because the doc said otherwise they would have taken her appendix.

Wow.

As I look ahead to the damage control I see on my plate as a result of the schedule going haywire, these are blessings staring at me that I need to stop, embrace and celebrate – even though my tendency in the moment is to try to ignore the stress and stay focused on what did not get done, what I did not accomplish and how to try to rectify it.

I handled three major crises, which all resolved into blessed outcomes. The week wasn’t one of failure; it was one of success. I need to take time to be more grateful and celebrate that.

Thanks for the reminder.

(written a week ago, just uploaded now thanks to computer twitches…. sigh, such is life…)