This one’s a two-shot tonight, the first is a little quote I came across recently:
“Victory doesn’t always mean you get what you want.
Victory sometimes is just making progress.”
Which can tie nicely into:
“Don’t let perfect,
Be the enemy of good.”
But the real part two of this post is arises from personal experience:
“When you imagine success only as a particular and singular outcome,
(Even more-so when you plan each successive stage to accomplishing it!)
Then you have one single path to victory
And a million paths to be unsuccessful.”
Which is totally something I have done and will still do when I’m not mindful about it. It’s also a place where both my vivid imagination and integrative training can lead me astray, for I can picture an outcome, see how different facets might affect it, refine and aggrandize it in a cycle, all until I’ve visualized a totally lofty success! Even better, I can walk through all the steps to get there until I’ve got a Plan(tm).
But, alas, turns out I’m not actually omniscient. Not only are there multiple paths to get there, but there exists many outcomes that could be as good, or perhaps even better, than what I’d projected. Which is great! But with that vivid image and path I’d created, tunnel vision can quickly lead me to not being present, not seeing opportunities, and therefore avoiding any of those better paths that could lead to a victory.
The grand vision tunnel has another downside: even if it ended well, if it didn’t turn out exactly like I thought it should then it can still feel like a letdown or failure.
Leaving behind the metaphor of branching paths we come, of course, to the one of a middle path existing here, a middle path that does indeed have a destination in mind and a route and plan to get there, but one that firmly remains as a and in the realm of a possibility (an intention of which there are multitudes of ways that could be satisfied) while also remaining present and able to flow and adjust to what comes along.
Traveling forward in that way, rather than a 1:10000 ratio of win:nope the odds become much more favorable, and any undesired end never seems as final.
Lynx Thoughts 