When you know you've screwed up

Some days you just know you've screwed something up.

Maybe it happens like this: you don't mean to, but you skip breakfast. Maybe you got too busy too quickly--or you didn't have any food you wanted to eat--or you had a big cup of coffee and it got you through your morning on only 35 calories of sweetener. For whatever reason, you are ravenous by 11AM, and you end up making a crap decision for lunch. You go to a buffet. You finish the first plate of food, and you think "geez, I didn't eat anything all morning, and I could still eat..." So you get another plate of food. Back in the day, this might have been business as usual, but since your body is used to eating just about the amount of food you actually need, when it gets too much you end up feeling like CRAP.

Now it's afternoon, your belly is bulging over your new skinny jeans, and you couldn't go for a run if a dog was biting you on the ass. You feel like a lump. In a desk chair. And you're falling asleep. Somewhere your day went terribly wrong, and you don't know where to go from here.

Well, this pretty much describes my day today, and I'm not proud of it. But I came here to write about it anyway--that was one of the choices I made in moving on with the rest of my day. Where do I go from here? Well, what can I do but move on. My decisions on this one day do not define me. I am defined by the decisions that I continue to make for the rest of my life.

I'm not even thinking about whether I'm going to "salvage" my day, or even "write off" my day, because this day is part of my life, just like every day is. I will make better decisions later today, and also tomorrow, and in the end the good decisions I made will outweigh the poor ones, and I will have had a great life. I believe this is all any of us can do.