Waddle Through Both

There's a meme making the rounds: a close-up of a goose with the thousand-yard stare. The caption reads: "CARRY ON. Life is occasionally beautiful. Occasionally complete carnage. Waddle through both."

I laughed. Then I thought about it.

Here's what's true about the goose: the waddle never changes. Beautiful day, same waddle. Complete carnage, same waddle. The goose isn't waiting for conditions to improve before it gets moving. It has somewhere to be, so it goes — one determined step at a time.

Most of us waddle just fine through the beautiful parts. Nobody needs a pep talk on a good day. It's the carnage that gets us — and not always because the carnage itself is unbearable. Often it's because we might treat a hard stretch as evidence that something has gone wrong. That the plan is broken. That we're broken. We stop waddling and start arguing with reality, with our self - and the arguing is what exhausts us.

There's a concept in therapy called radical acceptance — not approval, not resignation, just the acknowledgment of what is. The traffic is what it is. The diagnosis is what it is. The week is what it is. Acceptance doesn't seek to "fix" any of it. It just stops charging you interest on top of the original discomfort.

And there's the other half: you still get to move. A meaningful life isn't built exclusively in the beautiful moments — it's built in the decision to keep acting on what matters even when the moment is difficult.

So what does waddling look like for us? It can be simple effort on those challenging days. Getting out of bed. Talking to a friend. Taking the walk. Going to work. Doing the next small thing, without seeking perfection, while the day does whatever it's going to do. Nobody's handing out medals for it. The goose certainly isn't posing for one.

You don't need the beautiful days to outnumber the hard ones. You just need to keep moving through both — same waddle, whatever the weather.

Carry on.