It’s always interesting to go into class, being psychology, and learning something about your life in it’s current state. Among the many things learned today in class, we learned about “Shaping Through Successive Approximations”. In Lamen’s Terms, that basically means, baby steps.
To be more descriptive, it is defined as taking small steps towards small goals and being reinforced for those steps to eventually meet your future goals in life. It is the opposite of the “Gotta have it now” outlook on life.
As my professor said, for important things, you can’t just have things now, most things in life take time and patience to achieve. I am shaping through successive approximation by going to school. I know it’ll take forever, but the end picture will be great, because I have an education.
I would love to just be finished with school and have my career right now, but I know that I can’t. I know that it will take a whole lot of time and hard work to do this.
Just look at the world around you. If you really looked at everything, you would realize how much patience you really needed. Sometimes, things just pass you by, and you don’t even realize it. Take a walking sign. I bet you would love to just cross that street. You are short on time, you very much need to cross the street, but you have to wait for it to tell you to walk. Or you will get run over.
For some people, it is incredibly difficult to have patience for certain things. Which is completely understandable, having things as soon as possible creates a great amount of security and well-being. It is a comfortable thought, but in most cases you just can’t have things now. The most you can have are temporary fixes, which are just that, temporary. The only real fix is patience, and the eventual completed picture, after baby-steps are taken.
Now, there are a lot of baby steps. It takes a baby forever to get from one end of a room to the other. It can be a discouraging thought. Knowing how much of your life you have to devote yourself to school, in my case. Four years. That’s only a 6th of my life right there. It’s terrifying facing the unknown. It’s enough to scare you out of going to school for some people, and they lose sight on the big picture. The very reason they are going to school to begin with. We just have to stay strong, and keep our eye on the ball.
In my current state, I can only do so much at the current time. I can get a part-time job, where I hopefully wouldn’t lose focus on school. This is very touchy, because I know how distracted I can get while doing two seriously important things at the same time. I have the fear that I am not going to succeed in either if put a job in the mix. But I am willing to go to work, to help out my situation with my family.
Even so, I am still limited on what I can and cannot do. There is a lot I want to do right now, a lot. There is a lot I wish I could just make go away, and be happy with my wife and child. It is such a frustration not to be able to get what I want when I want, but I know that one day, I will get it. Until then, I can only do what I can do.
I’m just a guy sitting on the curb waiting for that stop light to turn green.
PEACE OUT.

[...] choose security for all the right reasons. “Shaping Through Successive Approximations“ has to do greatly with my decision. I can’t have the Gotta Have it All outlook. [...]