“Chase progress - not perfection.” This was a piece of advice from Peloton instructor Tunde Oyeneyin describing how to stay in the proper headspace as we moved into a particularly challenging section of class. It seemed so obvious. The kind of advice you might find on a coffee mug or a t-shirt. But the more I let it sink, the more wisdom I find.
When I chase progress, I am actively pursuing improvement. This requires that I notice and acknowledge improvement in the making, which is a totally different headspace than staring longingly at perfection and, knowing I will fall short of it, beating myself up.
I’ll tell you a story.
A little over a year ago, I participated in an ultra with my partner. An ultramarathon is anything over the traditional marathon length of 26 miles. This ultra was 32. Now, I'm not a runner and I hadn't trained. When my partner mentioned she wanted to try running 32 miles and suggested I might like to do a half ultra, she was already preparing to run her first marathon. Over the year prior, she had been steadily increasing her mileage according to a calculated schedule.
I said yes because I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. It was a trail run in a national forest in South Carolina two weeks before Christmas. It was an excuse to go somewhere warmer than Maine. I planned to walk it and I figured I would get as far as I could in the time allotted.
Race day arrived and I was pleasantly surprised to find someone had shown up to run the course in a velveteen elf suit. The timekeeper gave us the countdown and we were off. Immediately I noticed no one was walking. I started jogging. I jogged very, very slowly. A kind of shuffling jog walk if you will. There was one person behind me and he looked to be in his early 80s. He kept going, so I did too.
When I tell you these folks were serious trail runners, I'm not joking. Several of them belonged to a club. They camped together and did races every other weekend. I could easily have gone down the rabbit hole of feeling inadequate, in way over my head, but it was a lovely morning. The sun was making its way up through the trees inch by inch and my body was warming up. The trail was narrow in places and wide in others. Tall grasses rustled. Birds swooped and called out. I got a cramp and stopped to walk a bit. The man behind me passed me. Now I was in last place.
Then I saw someone headed toward me. I started jogging again so as not to look bad. It was a runner who had reached the end of the first loop and was doubled back, now at the front of the pack. He was wearing an elf costume. And he was carrying a portable speaker blaring '“Feliz Navidad.” As he crossed beside me, he held out his hand for a high five. I did the same, laughing. Another runner passed me a few seconds later. He gave me a thumbs up.
My heart lifted. These guys didn’t care that I was at the back of the line limping along. They were applauding my effort; the fact that I had showed up and that I was trying.
This story doesn’t end with me beginning to train as a runner. I still wrestle to get myself to the yoga mat and on the bike and to the weights. There are just endless other things I find that need doing. This story doesn’t end there. It begins there - with someone who doesn’t know me encouraging me. “Bring your whole damn self to the table,” is another Tunde quote. It’s not enough to bring just one part of you - the part that is already good at something. You have to bring all of it and you have to try and you have to be willing to fail gloriously.
I thought about this story today as I monitored the private chat room I have going for a group of students in an online workshop. I was noticing their willingness to share their struggles with technique, to risk posting images of work in progress, and to ask questions revealing their confusion. How they complimented one another on what they were doing, pointing out things that were working.
A recent essay in Decor Maine by poet and artist Arisa White offers a beautiful series of questions to ponder as we move forward in our studios and in our lives: “Which ideas allow me to pursue my magic? What are old ideas I’ve forgotten? Where are my places of possibility? What are my daring ideas? What feels right to me? Which of my dreams have pointed the way to freedom? What do I dare to make real? What new possibilities and strengths do I taste? Where are my dark spaces within? Which fears rule my life and form my silences?”
When we chase progress, we stay in the game, we show up, we mess up, we make less-than-perfect paintings, we wrestle with the small voices in our heads that like to tell us what else we could be doing instead of this big waste of time. We laugh at those voices and keep going. If we see someone else on the path, particularly if they look like they might be struggling, maybe we give them a high five. Oh, and that elf? You guess it. He came in first. Laughing and playing his music the whole way.