if at first we don't succeed .... (maybe we are measuring the wrong thing)


In 3rd grade I had to write my motto in the class yearbook (why did we have yearbooks in 3rd grade - I guess we didn't. It was some kind of written something like a yearbook though) and I remember writing "Try. Try again."

(Childhood memories that are truly our own, not the stories we have heard our parents tell again and again, show us so much about what we are made of now and what we are holding on to. Some people misinterpret this as a way to blame someone from our past, but if that is what we do with our memory we are missing the point entirely. The real question isn't what did the other person say or do to me but "what does it mean that I remember this thing? how am I made of this?")

I have no idea why I wrote this in my "yearbook" because even then I knew I was not a Try. Try again, kind of girl. I was more of a "do the stuff I am really good at only" kind of girl.

I was lucky (or maybe not) that the kind of stuff I was good at was the kind of stuff that mattered to teachers. I remember my teacher nodding her head approvingly at my 'motto'.

(that head nod is actually the part of my memory that is important; the approval for saying the safe thing)

Flash ahead a few years and no one would be thinking "Try. Try again." was a good motto. Not that we had become a world full of quitters, but it wasn't try-ers that were running things now - it was the do-ers that made things happen.

The world had moved on to "Do or Do not. There is No Try." YAY for Yoda! Then Nike eliminated that notorious 'try' word altogether with "Just Do It."

hope locket by cuddly rigor mortis and polarity
I still like the word "Try" though. And Hope, I like the word "Hope". I used to make a locket with the word Hope and people asked me all the time to change the word. They didn't like it.

I see the potential pitfalls with these words, but I still love them. Surrounded by people filled with hope that are trying to make things better is not such a bad space to be.

My favorite quote is T.S. Eliot "for us there is only the trying - the rest is not our business."

We can only do what we can do. The process is what we do. The rest is not our business.

I cannot disconnect Nike's "Just Do It" from the idea of winning and the winning part is sometimes (and often) outside our control and I am over the things outside my control (I have been totally over them since Janelle recommended James Altucher's book a couple months ago.)

being any kind of barometer for how I am doing - not because I am a control freak, really! but because I am committed to being about the stuff that matters and not just about the stuff that can be measured.

What do you all think?

(yes, I am channeling Dolly Parton now, I blame my increased bust size due to the 47 layers of clothing I am wearing right now)

xo I still have a winter mayhem update post to write this week, I haven't forgotten! Stay warm!

this is the year we do it ... better


 .... not better than someone else does it and not even better than we did it last year, because we were in a difference space last year and we don't fit in that space anymore. Doing what we could have (maybe) done then may not be the best thing for us to do now.

(and looking backward only gets us a sore neck and 
embarrassing photos on Facebook
when we walk into things)

We don't do it better by looking at what didn't work. We look at the stuff that went right. We focus on how we want to feel

Hubs and I went out to dinner a couple weeks ago. I had been spending a lot of time alone in my studio working and not doing a lot of talking and I shocked myself with the extent of the unconscious negative chitchat we immediately had going on -

about the guy who turned without signaling, the temperature, the shortened day, the pending storm, the traffic, the parking lot, health stuff, customer problems, my daughter's problems, my niece's problems, political stuff, Fukushima (hubs is obsessed with Fukushima) - all important topics, but I realized we were framing all our conversations about what was going wrong.

On the drive home I deliberately refocused us. I pointed out the beautiful holiday Christmas lights and Sully's latest adorableness on Facebook, a wonderful customer email I had received that day, the delicious leftovers we were going to have for lunch the next day ...

Every time hubs brought up a problem, I re-framed it. Every time I was about to say something that wasn't something I wanted or connected to how I wanted to feel, I stopped.

When we got to the house I asked George if he noticed what I was doing and he said "yes, but what good does it do to pretend everything is perfect - how does that fix anything?"

This isn't about pretending everything is perfect. It's not about fixing anything or getting so fixated on who we want to be that we lose sight of who we are. But once we know we get what we focus on, scratch that - once we know we are what we focus on - once we really know this, this mindless negative chatter matters.

It matters alot.
 
We currently have a Venus Retrograde that takes us right into a Mercury Retrograde which takes us right into a Mars Retrograde (some people may feel like they aren't really getting started until May!)  - this can create a whole lot of space for us to reinvent ourselves this year.

So how do we want this all to play out? What are we going to do with this space we have been given now to make the stuff that we know isn't working for us better? Hoping everyone is having a wonderful New Year! We are expecting snow to start any minute here!