Tuesday, May 26, 2026

What is progress?

"What is progress and how do you measure it?  What if your perceptions change resulting in uneven comparisons?"

I wrote this in my journal on January 4, 2015.  For context, based on prior journal entries, I probably hit rock bottom with my chronic pain in November and December of 2014.  I had written about how it affected my choir participation and the ways I felt I was letting down my fellow altos.  I had written about the uneasiness I felt of my boss accepting the documents I drafted without review that I knew I had drafted in a fog.  I wrote about my struggles with trying to figure out how food was triggering pain.  And there are several entries about the effect of narcotics on me.  I only took them in the very, very worst moments because I hated how they made me feel.

Other entries were upbeat with the intentions I was setting and the things I was finding to help me.  And there is so much poetry during this time of the beauty I was seeing in the world.  I even wrote about the awe I felt driving through an interchange!

So I was living in a world of extremes - the pain that I felt controlled my very being and the beauty I grasped onto trying to counter that control.  And life was changing so fast that my perspectives were changing.  So I struggled to see my progress.  I struggled to understand my world.

When I read this entry today, I paused and re-read it several times.  It felt like it had been written for today.  I still feel like I'm caught in a world of extremes, although not the same extremes and not for the same reasons.  And life is changing so rapidly that I can't keep up with the way it is altering my perceptions.  I struggle to measure my progress because any comparison I try to make feels uneven.

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