One Little Victory

When things are dark and awful, light can shine on your life with one thing.

One Little victory.

One event.

One moment where you feel the tide shift in your favor.

Tough days happen. Days where you are sad and frustrated. All of that can change with one event. If you talk to people and read, you see that most of us have our own set of situations and it is intensely easy to lose ourselves in our scenarios.

After a couple of days, it can get to you in part because you become myopic in the grand scope of things. I’ve gone through my share of rough patches and in one recent patch, where emotions threatened to get the best of me, I decided to take action.

I got home, did some reading, found a cause to help and donated $40.00 to help a man with advanced ALS to save his home. Then I decided to go surf. Then I set a goal of one of my projects and met it. Then the next day I bought a man’s breakfast. Then I asked two visitors at my office if they cared for some coffee on the house.

Each of these actions was a small victory and it all began with the most important victory of all:

Deciding to break the cycle and doing things to make a positive impact.

The work is still there, the deadlines and due dates are still there, the people with less than stellar attitudes also remain. These things linger and should not have the power to cloud your mood. They shouldn’t block the light that shines from within and are actually invitations to be better people despite what we face and to focus on all the good we can do.

That’s a far cry from all the complaining I was doing. And you know what?

All it took was one little victory.