Don't Worry - Work

I was recently asked by a teacher of mine what my educational goals were for this week as pertaining to her class. I responded that I planned to have a fully-formed first draft of a paper written by the end of the week, thinking that I had at least another week after that before it was due. As it turns out, the paper is due by the end of the week. When I received that news this morning, my stomach dropped. I began to panic. The paper, which hadn't been at all troubling to me prior to that moment, was suddenly a source of stress and fear.

As it turned out, I needn't have worried. After a few moments of being paralyzed by fear, I did the only sensible thing I could have done; I went to work. I double-checked the rubric for the assignment (which I had already read some weeks ago), brainstormed some ideas of what to write about, formed a simple outline, and began typing. What had suddenly become a terrifying challenge gradually became a manageable one. All because I stopped worrying and got to work.

In life, there are plenty of challenges, and some of them seem terribly hopeless and intimidating, yet, the only causes that are truly hopeless are the ones we don't attempt. When we're faced with such a challenge, we could choose to give up, letting the challenge defeat us before we even try, or we could rise to the challenge, and work to overcome it. We may still fail, but at least we'll have known that we tried, and if we hadn't made that effort, we certainly would have failed. As Wayne Gretsky once said, "You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take." We owe it to ourselves to at least take the shot.

And once we begin to work on our challenges, we may begin to see them in more realistic terms. Tasks that seemed intimidating at first may begin to seem less challenging. Sure, a good essay can't be written overnight, but once I divided the assignment into steps, it became much easier to work on. Once I started working on the paper, my fears about it began to subside. Now, I am once again confident that I can write a fully satisfactory, well-worded essay and have it completed well before the deadline, even though the deadline is coming up sooner than I had thought. I'm not worried about my paper; I'm working on it.