When Pretty OK Is Actually Miraculous

I read something tonight on the Simple Marriage blog that I just had to share with you because it speaks to the fine line that so many of us are walking between deep acceptance and striving for more.

The post is by Kathleen Quiring and it’s called “In Defense of Pretty OK“.

What Kathleen sums up so well is the sheer amount of pressure that we can put on ourselves in our constant questing and striving for improvement.

And this pressure comes into play especially when we’re seeking to make progress toward something we  really love and desire because it can feel like there’s a lot riding on whether we move forward today or not.

On this quest, and in any dance with our resistance, there are going to be days where it seems like not much happens.

There are definitely going to be times when we just don’t have the energy to “be awesome” and days when we shoot for something and fall way short.

These days are the most essential part of our practice.

My teacher Daniel at The Way of the Heart likes to talk about this in terms of meditation (and I’m sure many teachers of many diverse practices would speak about it this way.)

He says that the essence of any awareness practice is that you show up, sit on the cushion, stand on the mat, etc, and you watch your breath or your thoughts or your body and every time you wander, you come back to the practice.

And suddenly, one day….something happens!

You have a breakthrough or an epiphany or a vision or experience that you’ve never had before. And that’s when we tend to say “Ah, finally something is happening!”

And Daniel points out that those breakthrough days are the only days when nothing really happens.

Yeah, really! Every day when you gutted it out and felt like you got nowhere, and your mind was all over the place, or you failed to take that day’s appointed step, you were actually doing the real work of the practice.

And the breakthrough day was the day when there was no real work, you just got to reap the harvest of everything you’d been putting into it before.

And we don’t tend to celebrate or even notice the pretty OK days.

We keep looking for the flash of awesomeness that tells us we’re on track and we’re getting somewhere. And, in all fairness, that beautiful, glorious flash is so motivating and soul-sustaining that we need them every once in a while.

But I think we also need to tell the stories of the tiny miracles that happen on the way to the awesome.

Like the moment when we DIDN’T snap at our partner and when we didn’t turn on the TV or ate the veggies instead of the pizza or struggled with our monkey mind in a meditation.

These are the tiny miracles. And they add up.

Let’s hear some of your tiny miracles – tell the stories and celebrate them in your comments below.

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