There are lessons to be learned in many different circumstances. I was reminded of an important one last month, but not in a way one might expect. No, I learned (or relearned) a lesson during a fun morning of snow shoveling.
I’m happy to share the lesson with my readers without making them shovel my driveway.
Spring Snow…in February
The Front Range of Colorado is a gorgeous place, to be perfectly honest. For most of the year, the weather is beautiful. However, with the good comes the bad, and occasionally, the experienced Colorado resident has to expect a snowstorm. Furthermore, what is usually called a spring snow will come, which means that the snow is wet and heavy. Normally, such a snow would come, to no one’s surprise, in the spring, but since Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow this year, we are supposedly getting an early spring…which explains the spring snow that we got, not very long after that groundhog told us spring was coming.
The Snow Shoveling
Most, if not all, cities around where I live require that public sidewalks be shoveled within 24 hours of the snow stopping…which it did recently after dropping about ten inches on us. We therefore decided that I and my youngest would get up early the next morning and shovel the sidewalks. Since we needed to drive to at least one place today, we set out to shovel the driveway as well.
Here’s the thing with shoveling spring snow: as I said, it’s wet, and it’s heavy. It took a long time to get the driveway and sidewalks cleared off.
After at least an hour of shoveling, a neighbor across the street got out a snowblower and cleared off their driveway, as well as a couple of others in a very short period of time. And, to be helpful, the neighbor also cleared some of the snow on the street in front of our driveway, which obviously would make it much easier for us to get out if we needed to drive anywhere…and as I said, we did.
There was just one issue, as far as we were concerned: when the neighbor cleared the snow on the street, the blower threw some snow back onto our sidewalk, which, you will recall, is the one thing we had to clear to satisfy the city. (Yes, I had to shovel it again.)
This pretty well represents how much snow we got. Photo by Jill Wellington, courtesy Pexels.
So What?
“Sure,” I hear you say, “you probably could have had your neighbor blow the snow off your driveway too.” I possibly could have, if only I hadn’t already done half of it myself. “So what,” you go on, “does this prove about anything?”
Glad you asked.
I started way before my neighbor, but my neighbor was finished way before I was. This is similar to each person’s quest for financial independence. I took Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace course a long time ago, longer than I’d care to admit. Others (such as, say, Purple) started moving toward financial independence more recently. And, obviously, some people (such as, again, Purple) have reached that goal much more quickly than I. (I have a long way to go, still.)
And sometimes, my neighbors will get help with their snow-covered driveways. Similarly, on the road to FI, others will get extra help along that journey, and I won’t. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Other people have had a straighter career trajectory that I have, or they’ve been taught better how to make and save money more effectively or faster.
Even worse, sometimes someone else’s good fortune, or even their helping me out, can hinder my own progress. It happens. But the trick is to let it roll off your back and move on. (“Be a duck,” I’ve heard someone say.)
My Takeaway
No matter what other people were doing, we had to keep shoveling. Even if a well-meaning neighbor threw snow back onto my sidewalk, we had to keep going. Throwing the shovel down and giving up would not have gotten us to our goal. (The youngest may or may not have tried to do exactly that during our marathon shoveling session.)
And, similarly, giving up because I’m making slow, or no, progress toward FI won’t get me to that goal.
I kept shoveling. Eventually, we were done, and we felt very good about that.
I’ll keep working toward FI. Eventually, we will get there, and we will feel extremely good about it.
And so I will continue shoveling.
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