” But mom, I don’t want to do it myself. What if I mess it up?”
My son received one of those day at a time calendars for Christmas last year. When you pull each day off it has instructions for making an awesome paper airplane.
“If you don’t try, then you won’t have an airplane anyway. So what do you have to lose?”
He sat down and fussed with it while waiting for my help. We made an airplane, it looked nothing like the picture, but it did fly.
So often in my life I do the same. Saving a beautiful skein of yarn until I am absolutely positively certain what I want to do with it. Not making a flower bed in my back yard because I may later regret the location. Not wearing my favorite white pants, because with a toddler I will certainly get something spilled on them. Not writing in a beautiful new journal because I am unsure what to write about. Not eating the delicious yogurt in the fridge because I want to save it for later.
I will also write this blog post over a stretch of weeks because I wouldn’t want to hit publish too soon. Ya know in case I come up with something witty to put in, I wouldn’t want to miss that opportunity. (It did in fact take me two weeks to get this post ready.)
We have to be careful in life. Sometimes in our attempt to wait for the something better we may pass a gas station and run out of gas looking to save one cent per gallon.
I am not saying I plan to throw all our retirement savings in on an amazing month long European vacation for all our friends and family, but I am saying I will pull those white pants out of the back of the closet and wear them. I am going to write the blog posts and post them, even if they aren’t full of all the hilarity I could have put in them if I had waited two months.
Instead of waiting on something that you can do today, take action. Even if it isn’t perfect, get it done. When I wrote my book Flying With Kids, I wanted to delay publishing it to be sure it was perfect. If I had waited until it was perfect I never would have finished it. When I go back and read it I find plenty of things I would change today, but it is out there and it is helping people take less stressful trips and that was my aim. I doubt my next book will be perfect either, but that won’t stop me from writing it.
Do you have a paper airplane you are nervous about making? Build it anyway!
What do you really have to lose!
