Little things demonstrate big growth in our lives.  The alarm went off an hour later than usual the other day– and I didn’t panic.  My mornings are busy like everyone else’s: working on my business, working on my writing, getting myself and my son ready for the day, lunches, snacks, feeding the animals, cleaning litter boxes etc.  All of that happens before 8AM.  I normally wake at 4AM to get that all in and I’m regimented to make sure I have time to fit in all the things I both want and need to.  I’ve had the alarm go off just a few minutes late before and it nearly derailed my entire day so the idea of an hour later than normal, an hour lost, would have absolutely sent me into a downward spiral.  Something in me that morning legitimately just didn’t care.  I didn’t give it a second thought.  I got up and picked up where I needed to.  Sure, I had to make some changes, I didn’t do everything I normally do.  But everything that needed to get done got done.  And the reminder I found in this was simple:  It felt good to let go.  It felt BETTER letting go.  Would I want to wake up unprepared an hour later every day?  No.  But did that ruin my entire life?  No.

Truth be told, I feared time because of what people would think of me.  I was raised that we are expected to be certain places at certain times and if we aren’t early then we are late.  That if we aren’t exactly on time then we have somehow ruined the entirety of whatever the event was.  The only thing that ruined anything by being late was the attitude behind it.  Now, do I think we should forgo all commitments to time?  No.  But are there times when life simply happens and if we are running late or if we have to change our course at any given time that it has nothing to do with anyone around us and is no real indication about who we are? Yes.  Before losing that hour would have ended with me berating myself all day, talking about how stupid I was to not check the time on my alarm before I went to bed, and likely snapping at people for no reason.  But carrying those tiny mistakes with us serves absolutely no purpose.  Carrying the tiny mistakes like that creates more of a burden than the mistake itself.

Experientially using the knowledge we have to break old patterns, no matter how small, is huge.  Growth isn’t always easy and change certainly isn’t.  When we talk about the deep rooted habits/fears and nuances we carry, we are also talking about the beliefs we carry about ourselves.  That is harder to change.  So when there are opportunities to practice new behavior, we learn to integrate new messages and beliefs.  Tearing down old foundational structures isn’t an easy process and we don’t really know what we’ve changed about ourselves until we face a similar (or the same) circumstance and see how we react to it now.  That alarm going off that much later than it was supposed to and me not freaking out showed me just how far I’ve come, just how much the work I’ve done to change has shifted my course.  The work never goes away, the responsibility to something never goes away—we all have those obligations.  The only thing that changes is how we view it, how we handle it, and how we feel about it.  If we don’t like one of those things we are the only ones who can change it.  Talking about it isn’t enough—we need to put it into practice.  And sometimes we don’t realize how far along we are until we are in the situation again and we behave differently.