This week, I sent my therapist the following comic after our session because it was making me think.
And I think something clicked for me today. We claim to want to make these grand gestures, because they are so impossible and so far away that we will never have to face the reality of doing them.
Doing small things, close to home, is both more effective and more scary. It’s scary because we’re afraid of the possibility that we might do them and they might not work. With the big things, we know they’re impossible; so the uncertainty of trying, and maybe failing, is blessedly absent. We can continue to go about our business, not doing either the epic or the mundane, with certainty.
Uncertainty is scary. It just is.
But throwing yourself into the mundane, and really doing your best at it, is so worthwhile. Yeah, you might fail. But you’re a rad person and you work hard. You’re pretty likely to succeed, too.
(Do I need a category for “embracing Hufflepuff” ?)
Emilybook 