Idealism is the enemy of progress.

a story about imperfectly moving forward

The typical Monday newsletter didn’t go out yesterday because we’ve been moving.

To a new city? A new house? No. Just switching around the function, furniture, and items from every bedroom 😅 But definitely moving. Over the weekend, our living room looked like this:

We’ve lived in this house for almost two years, and it has not been working. We got an amazing deal on it and I’m so grateful to live in a beautiful home in the mountains, but having two stories and spread-out bedrooms has been unexpectedly difficult for how my brain works. And when friends come over and we have eight or more kids running around the house? My hospitality has just about shriveled up.

Before this home, we lived in a 420-sq ft RV, and I could gently say, “Kids, time to brush your teeth,” or “It’s time for stories,” and they would hear me and come. I had always said I’d be happy to live in a cardboard box, and tiny-home life suited our family well most of the time (though that’s another story 😉)

But a large, century-old, oddly laid-out house where I have to yell to beckon my kids? Most people would love that, but it’s not my style. Ten little hands were making messes far and wide, and my squirrely brain couldn’t keep track of where everybody was. The kids were getting entitled, too.

It felt like the size of our house had caused us to drift so far from our values that I complained about it for months then finally told my husband we have to downsize. “I wish we could just blow up the top floor,” he joked, and then we looked at each other with wide eyes and knew exactly to do.

We decided to functionally close off the top floor to children and essentially halve the square footage that’s accessible to them. The downstairs master bedroom became the girls’ room, the office became the boys’ room, and my husband and I moved upstairs. The paint and decor don’t match anymore—we now have a pink master bedroom—but already we’ve halved the space that can get messy, and it didn’t cost anything to do so. We also significantly decluttered.

I don’t have to yell “COME DOWNSTAIRS!”, the kids have more manageable cleaning responsibilities, and now the whole second floor is a chill hangout spot for grownups that requires significantly less maintenance. Par-tay 🎉

Ideally, I would be gifted at organization and family systems and I’d be able to thrive in any space.
Ideally, my husband and kids would all be superstar cleaners.
Ideally, our house would be efficiently designed.

But the ideals weren’t happening, so I froze. I complained. I spent hours on Zillow. I gave up trying to make it work.

Idealism is the enemy of progress.

This is just a small example of how we allow ourselves to give up instead of moving on imperfectly. When what seems to be possible for “everyone else” or what was possible in a previous season isn’t happening right now, we tend to feel like our hands are tied.

Maybe you’re going through something that’s a much bigger deal than a two-story house—pardon my first-world problems 😬—but I hope you can embrace this concept too.

There’s a helpful phrase from one of my heroes, Elisabeth Elliot, whose husband was speared to death in Ecuador when their daughter was only ten months old. (Their story is told in the movie End of the Spear and documentary Beyond the Gates of Splendor.) I listen to people who have suffered greatly, because they know a thing or two about how to move forward in non-ideal circumstances.

Here are four powerful words that she wrote once, and my friends and I love to encourage each other with them: Do the next thing.

There’s a time to sit and grieve, and there’s a time to move forward even if you don’t know exactly how to make it work. In entrepreneur-world they use a phrase called “massive imperfect action.”

You keep going toward the goal even if you’re not quite doing it right.
You keep pursuing your values even if the circumstances aren’t lined up perfectly.
You keep believing that you can even if you don’t feel entirely equipped.

Do the next thing, friends. Let go of what “should” and embrace what can.

I hope that helps ❤️ I’d love to hear what’s not ideal in your life right now and ways that you’re finding to imperfectly move forward in spite of it.

Warmly,

Hope from Family Scripts

And here’s a lock screen for ya!