Missed a day

Well, I spaced out on the blog yesterday--just thinking of other things.
So much for consistency. Or at least, so much for extreme consistency.

It's important to be able to recognize that the more restrictive your intentions are, the harder they are to fulfill and the more binding they become. There are times and places to be hardcore about sticking to a principle.

But if you fail to live up to that principle, it should be enough to deal with whatever consequences ensue from that failure. One need not punish oneself for the failure beyond any such consequences. What good does punishment do? The question ought to be what you're going to do in the future to make your situation (and the situation of any who rely on you) better.

So I missed a day. The first one in over a month. It's not an incredible feat of consistency, but what can I do about it now? I can only strive to surpass it. I can only strive to continue to regularly write.

The same is true for any writer. We set goals for ourselves as writers, and sometimes we make them and sometimes we don't. How we choose to respond when we don't make our goals has an immense influence on our long-term successes. We can cry over the spilled milk of our failure. Or we can strive to clean up the milk and refill the glass. It's our choice.

In his book "Pulling Your Own Strings," Dr. Wayne Dyer says "You can victimize yourself by wallowing around in your own past." Dyer talks about bigger things than missing a day of work that you had detailed for yourself, but the principle is the same. He points out the choice between dwelling--"wallowing" in his words--on the past, and trying to do something for the future.