Of flapjacks and target practice.

Thursday is our family’s newly adopted pancakes and archery night. We lay out all of the baking ingredients, the griddle, and the baking sheet we will later lay strips of bacon on to pop in the oven before we load up in the car and head to the archery range after Kelley gets home from work. Everything is ready for us to whip up a quick dinner of pancakes and bacon once we get home later in the evening.

This fall, we signed the children up for archery lessons so they could learn one of their dad’s favorite hobbies and have something indoors that we could do as a family during Portland’s rainy season. We gave the boys their very own bows and sets of arrows as their early Christmas presents, and Eva received Liam’s old one as her own, which she proudly carries into the range, along with her quiver, after Kelley spray painted the forest green bow a pretty, bright white. Wrapped around the bow string is a hot pink finger rest, and her quiver is full of arrows with purple-and-white fletching. 

After a bit of coaxing from the others, I also find myself in the archery store, trying out different draw weights of recurve bows and selecting custom black-and-white-fletched arrows as the heads of antlered beasts stare down at me from their perches on the walls. (The neons make my eyes cross.) My ambidextrous self deliberates over a left- or right-handed riser as the salesman tallies up our total. “I guess this is my Christmas present?” I say as I wink playfully at my husband, whose smile couldn’t possibly stretch any wider as he outfits his entire family to join him at archery. 

(Just between you and me, I’d rather have unwrapped a spa certificate. But his newfound joy is gift enough for me.)

We’ve learned a lot in the past couple of weeks—how to shoot with the maximum amount of force by the smallest movement, how to keep everyone in the range safe by hanging up our bows when our turn is over, how to group arrows and adjust our aim and hold the bow gingerly in one hand while grazing our cheekbones with the other before releasing an arrow toward the target.

It’s a game of consistency, and the kids first work on grouping their arrows rather than on simply trying to smack the bullseye. This ensures they have developed their own technique and have learned how to aim; then they can adjust to group those arrows in the middle of the target once they’ve proven their technique by shooting their arrows all in roughly the same spot down range.

Archery is a highly technical skill, and there is a lot of detail that goes into every shot, so much so that it can make your head spin. (Or maybe that’s just the faint smell of weed coming from somewhere near the indoor range. Ah, Portland.) Moving three fingers down the string just one millimeter, or tilting the bow just slightly, or angling your stance a few measly degrees, will have a significant impact on where the arrow actually pierces the target. Opening your hips just a smidge to the right can mean your arrow hits your neighbor’s target instead of your own.

And it’s in that principle that an intentional life is demonstrated. 

Life change rarely happens overnight. Most often, we are the sum total of little choices that we make day after day—seemingly insignificant twitches that can move the needle great distances over time. No, life change builds gradually, slowly, almost indistinguishably with those little steps we take over and over.

I have made greater strides toward increased overall health, attaining bigger goals I’ve set, deepening relationships—not by one-time grand, generous gestures or major dietary overhauls or an extreme workout program, but just by simply choosing to take baby steps consistently over a period of time. The smaller the choice seems to be, the easier it is to stick with it, and the greater results I yield in the end.

I didn’t transform my home into a minimalist abode by one haul to Goodwill. It was accomplished as the result of more than six years of small choices one at a time—first cleaning out by category, then eliminating piece by piece, room by room; then cutting down on unnecessary purchases, and so on. 

The same is true in character building and personal disciplines. My friends tease me frequently on how healthy we eat or simply we live, resigning that they could never be that disciplined. (I think they’re exaggerating our lifestyle a bit.) But we didn’t make the progress we have by developing personal disciplines overnight. My habits were built with intention, brick by humble brick, year over year.

Adjusting just one thing consistently will lead to some major gains over time. I built muscle by adding small amounts of weights, a couple of additional reps, over months at a time. It barely felt like extra work; the additions were minuscule, but six months down the road I now notice that I can carry heavy loads with ease.

In an effort to live more sustainably, our family just focused on making small changes one at a time. First, we switched to cloth napkins at mealtimes instead of using paper towels. 

Next, we switched to wool dryer balls instead of reaching for disposable dryer sheets the next time we made a Target run. 

We started using more natural light during the day instead of turning all the overhead lights on. Then we switched to reusable stainless water bottles instead of buying the plastic counterparts. 

One item at a time, we cut out plastics, replaced disposable items with more sustainable, reusable ones. We minimized our weekly meat consumption one meal at a time. 

We may look like a completely different family than we did five years ago, but because we made changes incrementally, they were hardly discernable. In the end, those small adjustments, over time, significantly changed the course of our lives.

Conversely, bad habits work the same way. If you want to start a new hobby or business or learn a new skill, all those nights of Netflix and chill will eventually add up to work against you. Just two hours of binge-watching your favorite show every night will add up to 30 days—an entire month—of your year that you’ll never get back. 

If you are aiming to spend more time with the family but continue to duck down to check your smartphone—well, all of those 30-second Instagram scrolls can add up to hours of your week gone forever down the social media rabbit hole, never to be recovered. 

That afternoon grande Frappuccino you treat yourself to on the way to pick up the kids from school? Just switching to regular coffee could save you from eating 36 pounds of sugar in a year.* (Based on a regular Starbucks grande Frappuccino.)

We can console ourselves and say these minor daily habits don’t matter, but they are in fact the very bricks we are building our lives with. Ultimately, it’s not the major life events or grandiose one-time gestures that change us, but it’s the daily choices to do the next right (or wrong) thing that determine what kind of a life we construct. 

It’s the minor adjustments we make consistently that determine where we will land.