Celebrating Small Wins

Sauna floor

Okay. So here’s a thing. It’s really easy to gloss over small wins when it comes to big things. It’s really easy to ignore the small accomplishments along the way when the bigger goal is still a thing that will happen in the near or distant future. Whether it’s a building project, an event, a degree, a big work or life goal or regaining mobility & strength after an illness or injury, it’s way common not to acknowledge or take notice, let alone celebrate, the small good things taking place day-by-day & week-by-week.

I put active effort into taking notice of the small wins here at EM, and additional effort into feeling into the sensation of satisfaction when we manage to take one more small step or some small piece of the puzzle gets done. It’s worth mentioning that this practice does not come easily or naturally to me. This practice takes intentional effort. This practice is a practice. The only way to get any better at it is to do it. It’s a challenging and often difficult practice. And. In my experience, it’s incredibly worth doing.

Noticing & celebrating small wins helps us to develop the capacity for better managing the high-stress times which are a normal part of life & living, without getting unmoored from our practice of mindfulness or ditching our daily habit of sitting meditation when the going gets tough. If we are focused only on the future big thing at the expense of turning a blind eye to the progress taking place, it’s likely we will live in a chronic state of tension and frustration, much to our own detriment (and the detriment of those around us).

Our new covered storage area

It requires routinely reminding myself, over & over & over again, to pay attention to the progress and celebrate the small wins, especially when it comes to our building projects here at Empty Mountain. Since moving to the woods and starting EM in July of 2002, we have been in a near-constant state of construction, living-systems learning, and the experimental process of hosting programs, events & retreats. If I was only focused on the big picture and the bigger vision of EM that we have, I feel pretty sure that I would’ve tapped out of this endeavor of learning how to live off-grid & without running water in the woods, while simultaneously slow-watering the small starts of Empty Mountain as a practice center, by now. To do the long-haul of whatever it is and maintain our sanity, we must be willing to train in the art of seeing & savoring, at least for a breath or two, the good stuff going on. Otherwise, it’s likely the journey to whatever it is will be a nightmarish, tension-filled slog the whole way. 

I cover this topic a lot in my writing, both here on our EM blog and on my personal practice blog, which I’ve been regularly posting on for over 13-years. And it’s a topic I don’t reckon I will abandon anytime soon. The most important threads of practice need to continually be visited on a regular basis. Noticing and celebrating the small wins takes a lot of retooling of our societally ingrained lessons and beliefs. It’s not likely to be something we just get right away and do it. It’s much more likely that it will make sense to our intellect but we will struggle greatly to put it into play as a thing we actually do.

Home Resources doors; we whittled it down to these 2. It was a tough choice. We liked both. We chose the one on the left, made of solid oak.

Over the past week, Mike’s dad was visiting and gave him a hand for a couple of days working on our wood-fire sauna build. They milled up some lumber from the new logs we were recently given by the local loggers and installed some of the flooring. Mike & I also went to Home Resource, the local re-use center in Missoula, on two different occasions last week and managed to find used windows and a door. So we’ve been making good progress. And Mike finished the new storage structure I mentioned in our blog post last week, which is both functionally awesome & looks great!

Still, it’s incredibly easy for me to lapse back into the overwhelm of being up against the clock in terms of winter approaching and our time & budget being limited and all the things we have on our plate. Thankfully, I’ve been practicing long enough to know that mindful breathing and the act of smiling are not just things to talk about or nice-sounding ideas to think about doing one day (maybe). Breathing & smiling are practices that involve depth and require grit and courage. They are not Pollyanna practices. We should be careful not to deem them as silly or trite or non-serious practices, which I think is common for us to do.

While there is for sure a way to misunderstand the practices of deep breathing & smiling and use them as a means to avoid the nature of reality or suppress what’s really going on within us, there is also a way to apply genuine & sincere effort into breathing & smiling that has the very real potential to help us take care of & transform our suffering.

Breathing in, I am committed to looking for, paying attention to & celebrating small wins; Breathing out, I smile

We recently learned that there are 2 white turkeys in the group of wild turkeys that regularly visit our neck of the woods. We read that white turkeys are rare. And somehow, our local rafter has 2!