Have you ever thought about progress? I've been dwelling on the subject for a few weeks now, in between work, weddings and the ins and outs of everyday life. Driving to and from work, or walking down a green shaded lane in Ireland, I've been confronted by the idea that progress works its way from the inside out.
Progress is incredibly hard to measure. You can feel that you are making progress in an area, and then find yourself ten steps back from where you began. Does this mean that there has been no progress made, or that the progress you made was then cancelled out in regression? Or does it mean that progress is not so much of a moving along a straight and measured line from A to B, but more of a growing, more of a stretching, and almost like another few inches in an unraveling of string.
It is more like the unsure steps of a toddler just learning to bear his own weight on his yet untested feet. A little stumble doesn't mean that he has lost the ability to get up again, or place on foot in front of the other and learn to walk. More so, it motivates him to get up and continue with renewed determination, because he knows that he got that far before he fell...
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that progress works itself from the inside out. It takes a conscious decision to step out in the first place, and then again, and risk the fall. The journey from walking to running often happens more internally than we give it credit for. It is easy when you're teaching or mentoring, to feel that you are making little impact, and that progress is just not happening. In my experience though, this is rarely true. In this life, we are rarely standing still. We progress. We regress. It is an inherent part of being human. We move forwards, or backwards, progress or regress, but we are rarely standing still.
Yet, in order to move in any direction, or more specifically, the right direction - it takes a conscious choice, and a determined effort. It also takes knowing where you want to get to. Without vision, a people perish. And without vision, progress is difficult. I'm becoming more and more convinced that each decision we face is a choice to progress or regress, to move in one direction or another. In every moment that I face, I choose to be a greater or lesser version of myself, I choose to strength or weakness, trust or fear. Of course it is natural to lose our footing at some point or other, but the measure of the progress is in how quickly we get back up and try again.
It's that internal decision, and decided motivation that will determine the quality of our progression. Speed of progression is neither here nor there - some things just take longer to learn than others, and that is okay. More important is having that sense of where you're going, and the confidence to get back up again when you stumble or fall. It will happen, if you choose it, from the inside out. To progress is to become.
