I Am a Work in Progress

On patience, perfectionism, and the instruction manual none of us were given

The other night I sat on the floor with my son Robert and we took apart a Lego set he had been building for over an hour. Not because he wanted to, because we had to. He was crying and wailing, oh no oh no it’s ruined. I spent a lot of money on this Lego so part of me was like we are not throwing in the towel now, and I also hated to see him so devastated, poor kid. I said ok, let’s figure this out.

Robert and his twin William are quite opposite of each other. William gets a Lego and opens it the way William does everything, one bag at a time, methodically, following each step before moving to the next. By the end he has something that looks exactly like the picture on the box. Robert on the other hand opens every single bag at once. Barely glances at the directions. Just dives in on pure instinct, going off the image on the cover, absolutely certain he can figure it out as he goes. Well, he got almost halfway through his $90 BB-8 Astromech Droid before he realized he had missed a critical piece somewhere back at the beginning. The whole thing had to come apart. He was devastated. And honestly, so was I.

I watched him want to give up so badly in that moment. The frustration on his face was so familiar it nearly broke my heart, because I am very much like Robert. I have always been like Robert.

My whole life I have been the person who tears open all the bags, skips the instructions, and charges ahead on pure enthusiasm. And when I hit the wall, when something goes wrong and I cannot figure out how to fix it, my first instinct has always been to hand it to someone else. My dad, bless his heart. A colleague. Anyone who could just handle the part I did not want to slow down for. I am now only beginning to understand what that pattern has cost me. Not just in practical terms, but in confidence. Every time I handed something off before I learned it myself, I got a little more convinced that I needed someone else to do it. That sitting with the frustration of not being immediately good at something was simply more than I could tolerate. Being a perfectionist on top of that made it worse. If I could not do something well right away, some part of me decided I was not meant to do it at all.

Here is what is interesting though. On the yoga mat, I have never been that way.

I have spent thirty years learning that the struggle is the practice. That the wobble is the point. That you do not skip the pose you cannot do, you stay with it, you breathe into it, you come back to it tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. I know this so deeply in my body that it does not even feel like patience anymore. It just feels like the work. The hard days on the mat, the days when nothing flows and everything feels stiff and off, those are not failures to me. They never have been. They are just part of the practice.

And I think about this a lot lately, because somehow that same wisdom has not always traveled with me into the rest of my life. When something hard shows up outside of movement, something unfamiliar, something I am not immediately good at, a different version of me shows up too. The one who loses patience fast. The one who wants to hand it off or walk away rather than sit in the discomfort of the learning curve. And the strange thing is that I have spent decades teaching people to stay in exactly that discomfort. To trust the process even when progress is invisible. To know that the struggle is not a sign that something is wrong, it is a sign that something is happening.

I know this. I teach this. And still I forget to bring it with me everywhere I go.

My yoga teacher said something once that has stayed with me: no one can clean out your closet for you. I know we all want a magic fairy to swoop in and handle it, I certainly do. But when someone else does it for you, you still do not know how to do it yourself. And life is always going to get messy. The closet is always going to need cleaning again.

Robert finished his Lego that night. Once we went back together, found the missing piece, and rebuilt from there, he finished the whole thing. The look on his face when it was done, that pride, that quiet joy, I will not forget it. Another Lego is going to come along for him. His instinct will probably be the same. So will mine. But slowly, steadily, I think something is shifting for both of us. The instruction manual for life does not exist. We really do just figure it out as we go. And maybe I can start putting things together while I am still reading the directions. Maybe it will not be perfect. Maybe I will have to go back and retrace my steps more than once. But it will be mine. And that is worth something.

I am a work in progress. And so are you. And that is exactly enough.

Close your eyes, settle into your breath, and quietly repeat that to yourself. Don’t give up on yourself yet. Don’t give up on yourself ever. Can you imagine how proud you will be when you see your works of art come together, knowing you made them yourself? It is okay to lean on people along the way too, we all need that sometimes. But never let yourself believe you are not capable, no matter how long it takes or how many times you have to go back and find the missing piece. There is nothing you cannot become in your own time. And there is no end game. You get to build Legos for the rest of your life.

How great is that?

I AM A WORK IN PROGRESS
I AM A WORK IN PROGRESS
I AM A WORK IN PROGRESS