To say ‘I woke up this morning feeling like me’ seems obvious. After all, I woke up yesterday feeling like me, and I’ll most likely wake up tomorrow feeling like me as well. In fact, most all of us wake up every day feeling like us. Why is this important? Well … it’s actually really important to consider if we want to know how far we’ve come in life.
As we progress through life we all change all the time, in tiny almost imperceptible ways. I know that I’m a very different person than I was twenty years ago, ten years ago, one year ago, and even six months ago. In fact if we commit ourselves to doing the work of progressing ever more towards a life of greater balance, to learning, growing and evolving, and to developing our organizations culturally, then we are all changing all the time. Yet, we wake up every morning feeling like us.
It’s been said that it is much easier for another person to notice the growth in us, than for us to see it in ourselves. I’ve sensed this for quite a number of years now. My wife Maria shared a story with me some years back, which I like to share whenever I can. It’s a story of an old man and a young man hiking up a mountain. After some time of hiking together the old man turns around and walks backward. After walking backward for a while the young man asks the old man, “Why are you walking backward? Isn’t it more difficult to walk backward?” To which the old man replies, “It is important to look down the mountain to see how far we’ve come, and not to always to be looking at how far we have to go.”
When we are changing in tiny almost imperceptible ways on a daily basis, we are continually adjusting to our new way of being in the world and changing only as much as we can handle at any given time and still feel adjusted and, well, feeling like us. So each day we wake, we feel like us, even though we’re not the same us as we were yesterday, or last week, or last year.
This is an important awareness for us to consider, so we can remain in a place of trusting that we’re on the right path in life. When things are going well in life, or when we’re planting seeds for future plans to unfold, or when we’re dealing with difficult situations that have the potential to clear the way for better things to unfold, or when we’re in the middle of confusion and frustration, we’re always progressing and we’re always growing. How do I know this? Because if you’re reading this blog and taking the time to get this far you’re obviously giving some amount of consideration to the question of how far you have come, and if you’re considering how far you have come, then you are growing and evolving.
So if you wake up every morning feeling like you, you can also be conscious of the fact that while you feel like you, each morning you wake, you are feeling like you as the new you.
