groundhog day

January 30th, 2023

• groundhog day as a thread
  • In the movie Groundhog Day, the protagonist wakes up again and again on the same day, repeating the same mistakes until he finds the right way to relate to his situation and then time moves forward.
    
    I haven't seen the movie, but that won't stop me from using it as a metaphor!
  • idk whether success =
    - do the day perfectly without mistakes
    - accept that he's going to do things that upset people or cause whatever problems, & just do them anyway because that's his life, rather than regretting them and trying to change them
    
    Either way, there's a lesson!
  • The lesson of the "make no mistakes" version is that with enough practice, you can perfect things (to some standard). You can learn and grow and change and become the sort of person who doesn't make the mistakes you used to.
  • The lesson of "accept your mistakes" is that you DID make the mistakes you made, and you have to start from there. Tomorrow is a new day—you can do something new, which could include repairing yesterday's mistakes, or might involve choosing to focus your energy on something new.
  • We're a month into 2023. Is the year going how you wanted?
    
    Did you even take some time to envision what you might want? Do you wish you did? Did you resolve to exercise every morning and you've already fallen off?
  • The power of doing something every day isn't because 365 days is the magic number of times to do something every year. It's because it creates clarity that the answer to "am I going to exercise this morning?" is always yes.
  • And you can start that any day, not just January 1st. But you do have to take some time to consider what you want and why, in order to get that clarity.