Last week, while out for a morning walk with my two little beasts – Eloise (the four-legged kind) and Bailey (the three-legged sort) – I noticed an older woman ahead of me on the sidewalk.

 

The woman’s walking pattern seemed erratic, so it caught my eye. First, she was quickly approaching me. Then, I lost site of her.

 

I continued to walk with the pups.

 

I then rounded a bend, and there she was again. I stepped off the sidewalk to get out of her way, walking through a little grassy common area toward a tree with a bench underneath it.

 

Then she, too, was approaching the bench.

 

I didn’t notice we were headed in the same direction until we both got closer and closer to the bench.

 

“Are you going to sit?” she asked.

 

“Oh! No, no, I’m just cutting through the grass here,” I said.

 

“Oh good,” she said. “I’m just going to stop here before I keep going again.”

 

Then I realized she’d been stopping at each bench in this neighborhood. There are probably a dozen of them over a half mile stretch.

 

She was an older woman, visibly hunched over, and making great effort to walk. With a smile, though, she said, “I’m just going bench to bench these days.”

 

YES. More of that.

 

“What a timely reminder,” I thought to myself.

 

This simple moment deeply impacted me because I’ve got some huge things in development right now, and it’s so easy to be paralyzed by imagining the whole thing – or the intended finished product – all at once instead of giving myself the patience, grace, and compassion to complete things step by step, in stages, benchmark by benchmark. I remember I need to walk my darn talk and cut myself some slack sometimes.

 

A book isn’t written in a day…

A service dog isn’t trained in a week…

Sustainable weight loss isn’t accomplished in 21 days or less…

A new sense of “home” isn’t established immediately…

Dissolution of an old relationship lingers…

Creation of a new one takes time….

Life is a process…a practice, even…certainly not a perfect 🙂

 

What could you give yourself more “bench to bench” permission to accomplish in your life right now?

I’d love to know.