I woke up with this thought in my head: don’t put the cart before the horse.
This idiom means don’t do things in the wrong order. I think of it as trying to start at step 20 without having completed steps 1-19. The dangers of putting the cart before the horse is that you’ll waste time and resources. You’ll have to go back and redo a step that you’ve skipped, making it highly inefficient. Inevitably, if you attempt to build a house on sand, your house is going to collapse.
Think before you act. I think, a lot, often considering the pros and cons of a situation. I consider the danger of doing something, or the downside of a thing to determine if it’s worth investing in, if I can see myself committing for the long term. Interestingly, there are lot of things that I don’t think about, because if I think then I certainly won’t do it. However, as the adage goes: if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Consider your field before you buy it. Consider the materials that you need before you start building. Consider the cost. Count the cost. There is a cost to everything. It’s something that I wish I had implemented this approach earlier, as it would have made the stress of enduring challenges seem less insurmountable. Regret steals joy and steals the future. Consider the decisions that you want to take, count the cost of it, and be ready to take accountability for it.
There is a logical sequence to doing things. The cart can’t be secured to the horses’ legs, for example. Concerning love, or of starting an enterprise, or learning a new language (as I’m discovering), a foundation must be set. One can’t expect to understand native speakers without a foundation of the language. What are the building blocks that’ll anchor your understanding? Moreover, when making friends, one must build trust, build understanding…I remember the last time I made a new friend. Sure, we talked about things that were familiar to us, until we decided to slowly reveal ourselves, differentiating ourselves and learning to navigate those similarities and differences in a way that built our friendship. But rarely do we reveal our inner most secrets with a stranger and then instantly become life-long friends.
Foundations are important. When I began calligraphy, I practiced earnestly every week, and as the weeks became months, I noticed a significant improvement. But then I stopped. And I thought I could just start from where I stopped, but I recently noticed that, when I took it up again, I didn’t master the foundational strokes. And although I generally know how to do them, it wasn’t natural. The letters are neither steady, strong or balanced. And my conclusion was that my foundation is weak. I didn’t make time and give myself time to do the boring work. I probably practiced for one session, and I jumped into creating words. But what this moment is teaching me is to be patient, to learn to endure the boring stuff, because it’s in these boring, seemingly mundane tasks that the best of what I can create will springboard. But if I don’t muster it now, I’ll limit what I can create and how to create it in the future.
This realization has certainly given me food for thought for a few areas in my life. It’s forcing me to slow down a bit, take a second look at my projects, and consider strengthening the foundations that I didn’t build well. Beautiful and successful things need strong foundations to endure. I don’t want to build on sand, buttressing my carelessness with “God will give me grace.” He is that gracious, but where I can fix things, let me fix them well.
Nevertheless, I appreciate that I’ve been building my foundation in God these last few years. I haven’t been perfect amidst the construction, but I’ve been learning. And certainly, building in God is one area where one can’t put the cart before the horse, because when trial by fire comes, you’ll know whether you built your gilded castle with straw, or it’s well-fortified in gold.
