The Road To Ideal Runs Through Better

​I had a conversation with a buddy yesterday who has lost a lot of weight. He sent me pictures of him attending two different weddings months apart, pictures before and after his weight-loss.

The difference was remarkable.

He asked me, Keith, how do we let ourselves get to where I was in that first picture? He said he knew that he didn't feel great. He knew he wasn't in the healthiest place. And yet, he didn't do anything about it.

There's something about unhealthy patterns in our lives. They are like quicksand. They suck us in because they are comfortable and easy to repeat, and then before we know it, we are way more stuck than we ever imagined we could get.

This can be true of our diets or exercise patterns.

It can be true of the challenging relationships we find ourselves in.

It can be true of the job we settle for.

I think the biggest challenge to getting unstuck once we're stuck is that we start obsessing over a picture in our heads of a life totally unstuck instead of simply taking a step toward it.

Seth Godin says, "the best way to make things better is to begin."

I think sometimes we want to skip better and get right to the ideal.

We want to skip healing and get right to healed.

We want to skip that half mile run and get right to the marathon finish line.

And many times, that isn't because we aren't willing to take those first steps, it's not that we aren't able, it's that we got ourselves so stuck that we can't begin to believe that a step will make any difference.

Often it's not because we are without discipline, it's because we are without hope.

Maybe hope comes from giving ourselves permission to believe that better is good enough. And recognizing that belief isn't selling ourselves short on our bigger mission, it's simply embracing that the ideal situation rarely comes before making our current situation better.

Many of us are living in some circumstances that can feel like a mess. Well, we can get stuck in believing there is no way that mess is going to go away, or we can start taking some steps to make it a little better.

In the end, that's really the only way a mess ever gets cleaned up.