Just because you fall, the earth isn’t going to move.  You just have to get up, even if you’re bruised, you get up and keep going.  Falling isn’t failure—it’s only failure if you give up on your goal.  This last month has been beautifully chaotic.  Beautiful because of the experiences I’ve had and the people around me, but chaotic because it has been busier than normal—there were several times I felt like I was going to drown.  Then people started getting sick and things simply weren’t going to pan out how we all wanted them to.  That chaos has distracted me and I’ve allowed myself to nearly get derailed from my goals because the vision wasn’t clear.  I thought I had failed in so many areas and I realized that not only were my goals not very specific, but the goals I did have weren’t a primary focus.  Bishoi Khella talks about how we feel inspired and then lose that inspiration when we don’t keep the goal at the forefront of our minds.  Look, life happens to us all and it’s not uncommon to have plans derailed or plans changed in the middle of a journey.  We just have to keep going.

We all fall sometimes—and we are taught when we are babies that when we fall we must get back up.  That’s a lesson we need to continue throughout our lives. As babies learning to walk we celebrate the attempts and encourage each other to keep going no matter how many times we fall.  As adults we need to remember to shift our perspective and encourage the attempts we’ve made so that we can continue to get up and move forward.  It isn’t the end of the world, it’s simply a moment.  Keep our priorities and goals at the forefront of our minds so that way little stumbles don’t even matter.  Focus on where we are going and the steps in front of us-life happens for us, not to us, so if we want to get where we want to be, we can’t let those hiccups stop us.  As we approach the end of the year there will be a lot of talk about setting goals and what we want the next year to look like.  Instead of being general or doing what we’ve always done, take the time to get really specific, get really honest, and get really focused.  Pick some small steps that can work toward the broader vision of the goal instead of trying to eat the whole whale and make sure that sail is pointed to catch the wind in the right direction. 

As painful as a fall may be, the truth is we can take it.  We can’t let a bruised ego derail a big dream.  We can’t let the noise or the demands of other people deter us from where we are going.  And we can’t let a little bump in the road stop us.  We are designed to move forward, we are designed to do the work.  We just need to put aside the fear of what others think of us.  We need to be willing to change what we know doesn’t work for us and we have to be willing to do things a different way if we see it isn’t working.  We have to be willing to endure the pain of an honest evaluation of ourselves and look at how we align what we say we want with what we do to get it.  We have to be our own loudest cheerleader and support.  We need to be willing to walk away from habits, patterns, thoughts, behaviors, and the egoic traits that keep us where we were.  We need to be willing to give up what we knew for the dream and hope of something bigger.  As long as we can do that, there is no failure.  Accept our blessings with gratitude and clarity and move forward.  Keep going.