Day 43: Promises, Promises

Today I had a lot of difficulty deciding what to blog about. In fact, I started three other blogs and tried to refresh a couple of others I have on hold, all to no avail. Some days there just isn’t anything I feel that strongly about. So that got to me thinking. How much of what we say on a daily basis is worthwhile and how much is just mindless chatter? If forced to write, I could put down 20 pages on no notice about any given topic. When I blog, however, I like to wait for inspiration to strike. When you feel inspired, your task somehow seems easier and less like work. With my blog, the work is self-assigned, the only commitment I have is to myself and yet I feel it more important than ever to follow through.

We make promises to people all the time. You promise your boss you’ll meet a deadline, your parents that you’ll call, your boyfriend that you’ll love him forever and yet we break promises all the time. Are the commitments we make to ourselves any more important than those we make to others and can you even quantify such a thing? Maybe in a world in which it seems easier and easier to disappoint someone the only person we can every really please is ourselves. You may cheat on your diet, but you feel lousy about it right? It is somehow expecting that we will not be able to fulfill all of our obligations to others, so when you bail on a friend’s party with an excuse you may not actually feel that bad about it.

Failing yourself stings a little more not because we are selfish and uncaring about letting down someone else, but because when that someone is you, rationalizations and excuses cannot cover the fact that you failed. Denial is easy in a lot of ways, but no matter how firm your uh-uh stance might be, lurking just beneath the surface is the truth and you know it. Everyday I wake up or come home and see that I still haven’t cleaned it is a reminder that I am lazy. I don’t sleep at night because I lay there and think about all the things I still need to do and didn’t get around to yet. As long as I am busy, I avoid reality, but when things quiet down it’s just me and my failures.

Writing this blog represents the one thing that I do each and every day simply because I said I would. Who knows, if I only made that promise to myself and not on Facebook and to friends, maybe I would have stopped at day two, but putting it out there for everyone to know keeps me from going back on my word. True, the only person I would let down is myself, but I couldn’t hide from it and it would be just another personal failure. The scary part is that I am only on day 42 of 365, and already I am struggling for topics, but I made a promise to myself and I’m going to see it through. Even if that means a few days aren’t exactly my best effort. So stay with me people, it gets better. The takeaway, is that I came through even when I wasn’t sure I could and being true to myself was the whole reason I started this blog.