“All [life] goes up and down and you can’t bat 1000 all the time,” Attributed to Julie Andrews on my calendar.  The interesting thing is right after I saw the calendar, I came upon a post from Steven Pressfield about the long view.  We do the work we are meant to do and not everything is a winner every time.  We have to learn the lessons and move on and we accept the responsibility for our learning process.  He even used the example of Bob Dylan occasionally putting out a bad album or Derek Jeter going down swinging.  We aren’t meant to win all the time.  We are meant to develop and learn and part of that is taking the time to see the point of the lows.  To understand that a single low doesn’t mean that we aren’t meant to have what we are seeking or that it will always be a struggle.  I shared with my son the other day the quote about falling 7 times and standing up 8.  We can’t look at all of those hiccups as dark nights of the soul—sometimes they are simply hiccups.  Not all is forsaken.  And even if there were facets of what we did that prove to be a waste of time, we still learned how to improve for next time. 

I know the perfectionist in me cringes at that concept and I often say to myself: I’ve wasted enough time in my life, every action means something.  The truth is that mindset is limiting and it puts unnecessary pressure on our role in the grand scheme of things—which we won’t ever really know anyway.  If we can learn to role with the punches, find joy, find presence, and ease into the moment, all will flow and make sense as it is. I know I have a tendency to make all my life hinge on these specific moments (like getting an answer on a job) instead of taking the time to decide what I actually want and focusing on that.  Scattered attention makes for scattered results.  We waste more time throwing darts at a target than practicing a specific aim.  The point in all that is it’s ok if things aren’t always in high season.  We aren’t meant to operate like that anyway.  We all need rest and time to incorporate and bloom again.  Take the long view.  Accept the idea that there is a point for everything, a reason for everything, a season for everything.  Sometimes that downward trajectory is building momentum for the next climb which is even greater than the last.