Why, hello there, it’s good to have you here again reading, and today, this time around,
I just wanted to share my journey so far. You know, I am always clamoring for discipline and consistency in life, and as they say, it’s not a destination, it’s a journey.
Every day, you have to make the decision, make that choice to be disciplined and be consistent in everything that you do, to show up every day, blah, blah, blah. I could go on and on about it, and I know that a lot of people tend to share their success stories of how they pulled through, and I do have a few of my own success stories if I do say so myself. But I just wanted to share a little bit of my not-so-successful story.
I’m not exactly sharing a story, I’m more or less sharing a thought and just a little bit of update. So, I decided to fast with my friend. In school, I managed to cultivate the habit of a weekly fast, and it just dawned on me recently that all through the month of June, I hadn’t upheld that end of my life.
I don’t know how it managed to slip past me, but my intentions for fasting during the month of June went out the window. Fortunately, I’m never the kind of person to beat myself up when I fail to meet up with things like that. I am only human after all. I decided to, you know, rekindle that, and it’s been good.
But this week, it didn’t go as planned. I did start fasting. As a matter of fact, I stayed fasting past 3 p.m. and I thought I was going to nail it for the day. Man was I wrong or what. I went to the market to get a few things, and I don’t know, I just got real thirsty, and in that heat of the moment, let’s just say I broke my fast. To cut a long story short, the issue for me is not the fact that I broke said fast. I mean, to an extent, it’s already three.
But fasting does come with a level of intentionality. The essence of fasting is not just to abstain from food, it’s to spend time with God. And when I woke up in the morning, as I usually do, I did pray, I was listening to messages, but the moment my day started, unconsciously, it got kicked to the back of my mind.
With the way my day went, let’s just say I wasn’t walking in that consciousness, and whether I like it or not, truth be told, it then changes what I’m doing from actual fasting and consecrating myself to God, to basically a hunger strike. So yes, I did fail. I would even be as honest enough to admit that I thought about eating countless times during the day, actually, because I don’t know why on a normal day, you can go the entire day without eating and your body wouldn’t care.
At least for me, it’s that way. But the moment you decide to consciously abstain from food, your body starts sending all sorts of signals. And it was one of those days where it was a challenge for me to actually fast. One would think, oh, after years of doing this practice, shouldn’t I be used to it? Shouldn’t I have it mastered?
It fluctuates for me. I just think that there are times when certain things are easy and there are times when they are hard. And it was particularly hard that day. And I know part of what made it that hard is that I haven’t fasted in over a month. I have to desensitize myself all over. I did break my fast and I was already eating before I remembered. Even though it was around four in the evening, o struck out the entire day.
Cause I had it in my head from the get go to break by six. That’s another thing for me. If I set out to break by three, I know that’s the goal. What I would not try to do is aim for six and then the only reason I broke earlier is cause I had a moment of weakness. Anywho, I just wanted to point out that I did feel in that aspect.
I failed at a concept that wasn’t new to me. And there are countless ways in which I have failed as well. This is just the most recent thing that I set my mind to do that I didn’t achieve. I don’t know, I just wanted to write about it because sometimes we strive so much to be perfect that we don’t cut ourselves some slack.
I wasn’t happy at the end of the day that I didn’t meet the goal. But I just knew that it was just another moment, it’d pass. And next time I’m going to do better. So maybe I did fail, but it’s not the end. And I tend to carry that mentality in my life a lot. Because every time that I failed is always a learning curve, whether I failed due to my incompetency or something else. It is still a learning curve for me.
That has helped me maintain a positive outlook on life a lot of the time. So yeah, that’s just what I wanted to share for today. So if you’re the kind of person who beats yourself up, you need to stop that and focus on the positive side of things.
It is with that positivity that you will be able to spread nothing but love and keep reaching for the stars.
