So, while watching the Sing-Off a couple weeks ago, I saw a trailer for the new Reese Witherspoon movie, How Do You Know. In the clip, Paul Rudd’s character says, “We’re all just one small adjustment away from making our lives work.”
We’re all just one small adjustment from making our lives work.
I love that thought. Not just because it’s pithy and cute, but because it’s true. It is in fact the concept that guides Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance. Make one small adjustment every day for a year, and you achieve more self-acceptance than you could have ever imagined. And Beautiful You is nothing special, it just voices what you already know to be true in a lot of cases. That is the thing. We so often know what the adjustment we need to make is. We just don’t do it. We’re stuck in our inertia. Inertia of our creation, often times.
And so, since I’ve heard that thought, I’ve been thinking about my small adjustment.
The thing is I think I have several small adjustments to make in order to make my life work the way that I envision it, but I want 2011 to be the year where I get all those adjustments figured out and made. I know that one adjustment I want to make is related to health. What I’ve realized in the last three months of seeing my dad grapple with his health is that the best possible situation you can put yourself in is to be at your personal healthiest– and what healthy looks like for me is not necessarily the same as what healthy looks like for you– when life hands you a curveball. My dad was and so he was able to deal with a few harrowing health crisis- two that almost killed him and another that almost left him incapacitated- in the span of two months. I want to face my life and the curveballs I am given with the most personal, emotional, and physical strength and grace that I can muster. And some of the adjustments I want to make are about being even more conscientious about getting myself there which involves sleeping enough, eating the right things, moving more, being still, reflecting. I also want to use my voice in ways that are more in tune with the way I want to be in the world. And I need to pay some attention and do some ordering and focusing in my professional world. Those are the notions that will order my adjustments and now I need to think through what’s actionable about those notions so that I can put them into place in the new year and beyond so that it is movement and not inertia that is guiding me.
What do you think? Are you small one adjustment away from making your life work? What’s your small (or not) adjustment?
Good topic!
Oh, so many large and small adjustments to make! I am facing down the double-barrel of major external change – moving away from England and the transition that will bring; moving (possibly) to Michigan, to a very depressed area and into the house my husband grew up in, with its forty years of ghosts; and working on starting a family (with health issues to tackle first, including minor-ish surgery). AND the transition of my husband into either reserves or retirement, and us both (maybe) into graduate school! Whew!
So I think the most important adjustment I can make in all of this is to learn to roll with the punches a little better, and as part of that learning process to maybe look into treatment for anxiety and change-related depression. You know – because there’s so much happening at once, and the biggest “small” adjustment I can make is to acknowledge that I can’t do it on my own.