Aaron's Status

8:25 am

“Don’t be afraid of failure. Only those who stop failing become a failure in the end.”—Unknown

Physical therapy can be a roller coaster ride. One day you’re up and everything feels great, and the next you’re down and it feels like the pain will never end. As with any complex system, the body especially, the important measure is the trend.

This is the same in learning new skills. Anything worth being good at requires you to be bad at it for a while. Every day that you can’t yet do the thing you want to be able to do is a “mini failure,” and a step along the path toward success.

I’m trying to “live from the future,” which is thinking about how you want things to be when you’ve reached the other end of the journey and behaving as though you’re already there. In reality, there is no “other end” of most journeys.

Doing the work, building the habits, staying the course is the whole point. The PT work that I’m doing every day is something that will make me a stronger, more flexible, more resilient person for the rest of my life. It isn’t a stopgap toward recovery from pain, it’s a lifestyle change.

I’m going to be the most flexible guy in my social group. It may take me three years to get there, but that’s the future I’m living from.