I recently had an appointment with a patient who is doing really well in his recovery. He was stuck in the mud and struggling for several years, but recently his life has started to go much better. He is closer with his family, his anxiety has improved, professional opportunities have opened up, and his children are doing great. Interestingly though, he is quite focused on a long term goal of his. He told me, “Doc, I think I am going to make it.”
“Haven’t you already made it? If the version of you from five years ago saw you today, what would he say?” He was in the midst of success, but it didn’t feel like success to him. He knew he was doing well, but it felt like he was still on the journey up. This brings up a larger truth: when we are focused on big goals, we often do not feel triumph, even when we are in the midst of it.
This occurs in different ways. Many times, people set a financial goal– say, to become a millionaire. But becoming a millionaire is usually a slow process of saving, investing, and being prudent with money. You accumulate a bit every day, every month, every year. Small accumulation over time becomes big accumulation, until one day, we pass that magic mark. But when that happens, nothing usually changes much. Another $126 in the account divides the millionaire from the not-millionaire, but nothing really changes.
There’s a similar process in recovery. People will hit various milestones– three months, six months, one year. While the milestones are worth celebrating, not much changes between day 364 to 365 to 366, the days feel pretty much the same. The same could be said for raising a family. Our children get one day older, then one year older, but we never really stop being parents– it just changes. There are milestones to celebrate along the way, and then suddenly, we’ve raised a family. In all of these scenarios, we are making progress, having daily success, but it does not really feel like it. Instead, we look for milestones or big goals to achieve, but those also end up feeling anti-clamactic.
This phenomenon of milestones not feeling dramatic is not new, but it leaves us stuck. Being overly fixated on markers to define success does not work, yet we do it because we tend not to notice success in the day to day. So how do we take pride and happiness in a successful life while we are on the road, and absent a milestone or big event?
I do not have a perfect answer to that question, but I do have a few concrete ideas. The first stems from our human tendency to notice problems and what is not working, more than we tend to notice what is working. I often tell patients that we do not typically wake up in the morning, and comment to ourselves, “You know, my right elbow feels good today. And my lungs feel well. My left knee is doing great.” Instead, our attention is immediately drawn to the ache in our back, our tiredness, or the twinge in our neck. If we want to be aware of all the many things that are working, we have to intentionally devote attention to them. This is, essentially, a gratitude practice– a routine that we engage in to be aware of all the things that we do have, as an antidote to our mind’s tendency to focus on what we do not have, on what is missing (see: It Works!).
Second, to feel the joy of our success on the journey, we have to actually be present for the journey. One of the ways we manage to endure difficulty is to justify it in terms of greater rewards. “I don’t like working these long hours now,” we tell ourselves, “but it will be worth it when I’m executive vice president.” While this approach can be useful, the challenge is that it shifts our attention away from the present, and puts it on the future. We focus less on the day-to-day, and more on what we imagine our life will eventually be. However, this cuts both ways– when we only pay attention to our future goals, we train ourselves to not pay attention to what is actually happening around us– good and bad. If we want to enjoy our success along the way, we have to pay attention along the way. This means we have to pay attention to both the good, and the hard.
Lastly, to enjoy what we have along the way, we might need to shift our sense of what accomplishment means. Reaching milestones is great, but the vast majority of our time is not at the milestone– it's in the space between them. When we define success as something that is possible at any moment, we can inhabit each moment more fully. For example, we might define success in life as being kind to others, or living a spiritually righteous life, or making a positive impact on the people around us. For myself, one of my definitions is to help people live healthy, happy, meaningful lives. I can appreciate success (or, honestly, failure) in the hour-to-hour, day-to-day. It is not something that is particularly dependent on a milestone. When we define success by these types of how-I-live ideas, we can often shift our perspective in a way that makes noticing success along the way much easier and more salient.
The milestones of success are relatively uncommon– that’s why we celebrate them. Most of our success does not announce itself, instead, it hides in plain sight and is easy to overlook. In order to enjoy the vast majority of our success– the parts that happen between the milestones– we have to be intentional about training ourselves to notice what’s working, stay present in the moment, and define success in ways that are available every day. Otherwise, we tend to shift our perspective to some distant horizon and ignore what is in front of us.
Love,
Doc
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