The road to hell is paved with good intentions…
I think this statement means that our good intentions can drive us into a version of our own personal hell if we let them. I have done this many, many times; I make a plan, that is difficult but achievable, and it don’t end up doing it and then I feel like a failure and I beat the shit out of myself and end up in a spiral of self loathing that gets me nowhere but the floor of my office in a big puddle while my husband and dog look on with concern and worry. It sucks and it is a personal self induced hell.
I am happy to report that I have grown and learned from these experiences and these days find myself (most of the time) being able to ‘roll with the punches’ so to speak. Yes, of course I still make goals and plans to do hard things, but I don’t dwell on the result if it’s not what I had planned to start with. Instead, I simply tell myself I can try again and it doesn’t have to be perfect to be progress.
Being able to take setbacks in stride might be one of the best things I’ve learned to do for my mental health. This comic really compresses a bunch of setbacks to my morning workout plan into a week that would have left me and my demon pounding a bag of chips and ruminating on the fact that I failed by Saturday morning.
The whole point here is that the bear takes all of it in stride, she does all the things and still musters up the gumption to finally do her planned workout at the end of the week, and she doesn’t unload what a shitty person she is to her Mum on Sunday.
As an aside, ALL of these things did happen to me in the course of a few weeks last winter, and it was really, really annoying at first, as I’ve grown to love my morning movement routine. But sometimes, if you practice enough, you can find as much benefit and headspace in cleaning up dog excrement at 6am, shoveling snow or doing something nice for a neighbour, as you can by doing a half hour yoga flow.
I am so proud of myself when I react to a set back – like a power outage (which happen a LOT where I live) – with an attitude of ‘Well, this sucks, but okay, how am I going to mitigate this and what can I actually do here’ vs ‘HOLY FUCKING SHIT THE FUCKING POWER WENT OUT AGAIN IN THE MIDDLE OF A WORK CALL AND I’M SO FUCKING SICK OF THIS SHIT I NEED TO MOVE’.
For one, I feel much better when I’m chill and cool, and secondly the dog gets super stressed when I yell at the computer, so I guess I’m really doing this for her??
The Graphical Bear 