From the inimitable wisdom of Dr. Leo Marvin in the film What About Bob? we learn that it is important to begin achieving personal growth and development by taking baby steps. It is easy to grasp quickly some of the advantages of breaking in a new habit or breaking out of an old habit by taking small - sometimes painfully, ridiculously small - steps that will allow us to begin progressing at a manageable rate that will not cause us to burn out or give up in despair. But I think if we only focus on, let us say, the length of our stride when we think about taking baby steps, then we are only benefiting very narrowly from baby steps. The principle of taking baby steps is about so much more than how much distance we cover. A baby learning to walk is not concerned at all about how far it travels or when it will arrive at its destination. In fact, the baby is not trying really to get to any destination in particular, except perhaps to the outstretched hands of its parent, or some other firm surface to lean against. For the baby, the steps are an end unto themselves. The baby can worry about walking to somewhere once it has simply learned to walk at all. The baby knows that its legs are weak and uncoordinated. The baby does not get surprised or discouraged when it loses strength or balance and topples over. The baby does not worry that it is not making it to the edge of the living room fast enough, and if it does manage to make it over to the edge of the living room, then that is a happy accident, not the product of careful planning and anxious worrying. And when a baby does begin to totter around on its own, it does so for the sheer pleasure and joy of walking. When we approach overcoming the challenges in life with the expectation that we can and ought to be running before we have learned how to walk, then we are destined for disappointment. Trying to put a deadline for us to master the task in front of us or a minimum daily distance that we must achieve is like loading up a backpack with a bunch of heavy toys and strapping it to a baby's back as it tries to learn how to walk. It will take much longer for the baby to develop the strength and balance to learn to walk with all of that extra weight, if it even learns at all. Our pride and our impatient expectations that we must master this new thing yesterday is the enemy to our eternal progress. “For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.” (Mosiah 3:19). For some reason, in this verse I've always read it as natural man vs. God and never natural man vs. child. What this scripture teaches us is to stop trying to learn and do things the way an adult would and start taking baby steps. We need to acknowledge that our prideful expectations that we can figure this out on our own through grit and willpower and that we can do so just as quickly as we like is only getting in the way of us actually growing and improving. When we take baby steps, we are submissive, meek, humble, patient, and full of love, both for our Father with His hands outstretched and cheering us on, and for ourselves as we neither judge nor criticize any of our efforts nor tell ourselves that we are not going far enough or fast enough. I hope that we choose to be a natural child instead of a natural adult and give ourselves time to take those first weak, uncoordinated, directionless, unhurried steps where we focus only on walking for walking’s sake and we leave off worrying about walking to someplace in particular once we have mastered the art of walking itself.
