I'm on the internet still. I have been up since 4:30 am, drove to clinicals, then skills lab after that, drove home, immediately got to work on a recent important assignment, took a break to eat dinner and watch the end of Friday Night Lights with my boys before I got back to it. The cool thing is that I got it done! One step closer to finishing nursing school! That's just going to have to be how I look at these things from now on. Every challenging assignment, every tough day, even every failure is a chance to make myself better, work a little harder, and before I know it I will be graduating.
It's kind of like training for a target race. You put in the work, keep at it even through the sucky days and workout-by-workout, before you know it, you surprise yourself and accomplish something amazing!
I am always pleased when I see parallels between my running life and another area of my life. Let me tell you about yesterday...yesterday was tough. I have been trying to keep my head above water while in school, stay motivated to dig deep and study/read even when I'm tired all while not losing my mind...you know the usual ;) But the stresses of home have gotten to me lately and I submitted aforementioned assignment totally incomplete and way off track. It was so lame I have to do it over. It was a serious bummer, I'm not going to lie. It was like flushing hours down the toilet, because even that lame assignment took lots of time. But instead of dwelling on my failed attempt, I gave myself 15 minutes to have a cry-baby-whiner moment. Then when it was over, I straightened my shoulders, wiped the tears from my cheeks and got a latte at Starbucks. I pulled on my big girl panties and came back fighting. By the time I drove home, I was ready to get plugging on the replacement assignment. And today, I was determined to have an awesome day. I ended up having the best day today thanks to that attitude! Instead of letting a bad day get me down, or worse, throw me into a panic (Ahhh! Am I gonna fail? blah blah blah...), I shook it off and moved forward, confident that my mistakes and failures don't define me.
I really have running to thank for the inner strength I managed to find this week. My old self a few years ago probably would have really taken the pooped-on assignment personally after puting so much work into it. But that didn't happen! The moment literally took me back to really hard runs where I thought I might puke my guts out, or where I was around mile 10, about to hit the wall but somehow found the strength to push past it and finish strong.
In the end, wallowing in failure and mistakes doesn't do anyone any good. After all, we are all bound to make mistakes, because that's life! If we stay there, and sit in the muck of our failure, it will start to consume us, then after a while, we will start to carry it around as if it kind of defines us. It will start to become an unhealthy influence for future decisions and might make us afraid to fail again so we don't take chances even when they could have amazing results. Or...we can realize how strong we really are...
and bust through that wall and come out stronger on the other side :)
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