The Hard Thing to Remember About "Making Progress"

I look around our home after signing a lease renewal for another year.

It's a beautiful home. We love it. A slope on the roof, big oak trees in the front yard, powder blue with black window frames. It's creaky, but in the best of ways. Sometimes when I lay awake at night and the house shifts, I imagine it's telling me the story of who it is.

I'm reminded of the opening lines from Dana Gioia's poem, Insomnia:

Now you hear what the house has to say.

Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,

the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort...

As much as I love living in this home, some moments are robbed of their joy because there are a few pictures yet to be hung. The chairs in the living room are placeholders from a friend - we've yet to find the chairs that we love.

We're not completely moved in yet.

If I'm not careful, this leads to a sense of dissatisfaction; I can focus more on wanting my environment to be settled into than settling into the reality of my life. My enjoyment becomes contingent upon the future I fantasize about coming to pass - on my terms.

I recall feeling similarly as I approached college graduation; I spent a good deal of time lamenting the post-graduate transition I was about to endure. I remember wishing I could fast-forward through the awkward stages of learning new things and/or finding my way so I could arrive at a place where, again, things felt calm and familiar.

One afternoon while I complained to a friend about life not moving along fast enough, she instructed me to listen to Billy Joel's Vienna

That afternoon I took a walk along the San Marcos river listening to Billy Joel croon:

Too bad, but it's the life you lead

You're so ahead of yourself that you forgot what you need...

We want everything we want when we want it.

But what if we remembered that we're poor judges of what makes us happy?

What if we reminded ourselves that most of the happiness in our lives up to this point has been happy happenstance rather than controlled and predictable pleasure that we achieved by trying hard enough to be happy?

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says in his book Stumbling on Happiness, “We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present.”

So maybe my dissatisfaction with how 'moved in' to our house I feel serves less as a motivator to finally get moved in and, instead, is the culprit of my sustained sense of disappointment?

I share this not because you need a reminder that living in the present moment is probably a better way to feel satisfied with your life station. We all know that.

This is top of mind because, lately I've taken to blaming myself for my life not moving fast enough in the right direction.

To continue with the example of our home: The issue is not necessarily that I'm waiting for my home to feel appropriately decorated so I can happy, it's that I fault myself for not having been productive enough on the weekends or caring enough about our environment to prioritize the final phases of nesting.

It feels like I’m to blame, not the unpredictable circumstances of life, that our walls are without framed photos.

And that's not good to carry around.

I wonder if you can relate.

Perhaps more than a fleeting sense of happiness, it's a sense of progress many of us are after these days. Which is maybe the American version of happiness?

We feel like we must always be moving forward, growing, upgrading, covering ground - so much so, that even our time off should include lots of exercise, reading, purging your closets, meal prepping and catching up with everyone who texted you happy birthday two months ago that you haven't texted back yet.

For me, unhappiness these days tends to rhyme with feeling behind. Or not being ‘adult’ enough. Or not being motivated, driven, or entrepreneurial enough.

I'm about to publish my first book, which I started writing over four years ago. Meanwhile, I was just asked to write the foreword for a colleague's book which he wrote in the last four months. He's going to publish his book in the same month I publish mine, and he wrote the entire thing in the amount of time it took me to decide on the artwork for my book's cover design.

What is wrong with me?

One afternoon during a late lunch I shared this with a friend who has walked alongside me on the journey of writing a book. He smiled at me and swatted at a fly buzzing around his head - "Maybe things just take as long as they take" he offered.

If I'm not careful I could take his advice to the extreme and excuse all kinds of procrastination and avoidant behavior.

But you and I both get what he meant.

He meant that us well-intentioned folk who are doing as good as we know how could take it easier on ourselves. We could accept that we're not moving as fast as others, or as fast as our inner critics think we should. And that's OK. Because sometimes things take as long a they take.

And just as we don't really know what makes us happier, we probably don't know how quickly or slowly we're supposed to be making progress.

I like what they say in Alcoholics Anonymous - it's about progress and not perfection.

Here's to pushing forward while also taking it easy on ourselves.