I stumbled across this quote the other day and immediately bookmarked it because I just felt so darn convicted as soon as I saw it.
I will be the first to tell you, I am the queen of ‘good intentions’.
Oh, someone had a bad day? I should totally send them a card.
It’s someone’s birthday? I have a gift in mind!
We have a party to attend? I’ll whip up some goodies to bring over.
… and the list goes on.
Now granted, sometimes I actually follow through with my thoughts/intentions. But oftentimes I don’t.
The same goes for making plans. I find myself committing to being at 3 places at once because I truly think I can manage it and my intention is to follow through with these plans.
This is always a recipe for failure.
*Uhhhh hello, Self, you are one person and cannot physically be in more than one place at a time, and you will not want to leave anywhere early, so your crazy plans are almost impossible to stick to!
What (I think) I’m trying to say, is that I’m guilty of thinking I’m a better friend/person/spouse than I actually am. And this is because I know my thoughts and my intentions and darnit, they’re good!
Unfortunately, loved ones (and I guess acquaintances and even enemies, too) can only judge us on what we actually do and not on what we think of doing.
How often have we heard that phrase? I know when I hear it from a loved one my first thought is not ‘OH! What a great friend I have!’ but instead it’s more along the lines of ‘OK, awesome, but you didn’t call so who cares?’
Harsh? Maybe, but that’s exactly what I’m thinking. (Well, unless there was a really good excuse, which, let’s face it, is rarely the case.)
The Husband is more guilty of great intentions and poor follow-through than I am.
Like when I finished my 2nd marathon he thought about buying me flowers to present to me at the finish line. But of course, he didn’t buy them.
So at the finish line he says ‘Oh! I thought of buying you flowers! Wouldn’t that have been nice?’
…. uhhhh seriously?! YES it would have been nice, but he didn’t earn any extra points for the thought! Instead I was just annoyed that he told me about it at all.
Notice we’re not posing with any flowers! But he did come to support me, so he did get some ‘BF points’ for that one.
He also did this on our first trip to Jamaica.
(While we were eating dinner in the light of lanterns, overlooking the ocean) ‘You know, it would have been awesome for me to propose here! I never thought about it until right now, but that would have been perfect.’ … it was at that point that I stopped half-expecting the ring to appear at some point during the week.
We now joke that he give me more ‘mental presents’ than real ones, because the man is absolutely thrilled with himself every time he thinks of a perfect gift, but he doesn’t actually feel the need to purchase the gift, he just loves telling me about them.
I don’t get it either.
I am absolutely just as almost as guilty as the Husband in terms of thinking of things I should do and not following through. I always figure that if I never actually make the promise out loud, no one will be disappointed.
But this is kind of a cop-out, because I’m also not being as good of friend/wife/family member as I could be.
I think we can all agree that it’s best to under-promise and over-execute than the opposite. And I think it’s even worse to tell someone what I almost did. But it’s also bad to not live up to my full potential and not do the easy things when I think of them and which I know have the potential to make someone’s day a little happier.
So I’m going to try harder to not give myself credit for thinking of doing things, but instead to do things as soon as I think of them so that they actually happen!
Am I the only one guilty of this? Are there things that you think of doing but never follow through on?
Cheers for acts of kindness!
