Consistency is my weakest trait by far.
It’s a theme that reverberates throughout my life.
Working out. Not smoking or drinking. Writing this fucking blog.
The trick is to do it, even if it’s just 1 minute.
Don’t have enough time to workout? Do 1 minute of pushups.
It’s about showing up. Keeping the habit alive and consistent is the most important thing.
This post is the equivalent of 1 minute of pushups. I’m just happy that I showed up.
It’s a hard time right now, and I’ve been doomscrolling for weeks thinking about Israel, Gaza and hatred in the West.
I’ve been affected by my good habits suffering, and excused return of some bad habits.
Fortunately, I haven’t become an asshole, or so I think.
But someone in my life has – and I’ve been resentful about it for the last few weeks. They have always been kind of a nice asshole, but this person has a lot going on in their life. Family stress and job stress for them were already pretty strong, plus a heavy layer of PTSD. This person is equally pained by the events in Israel, so they’re quite stressed.
While I’ve been resenting this person for a few weeks now, I realized today that they must be really overwhelmed and feeling quite helpless. And I decided to have compassion for them and what they’re going through.
Compassion is such a powerful tool for peace. If everyone exercised it, the world would be a much better place.
I learned about compassion as my father was dying. We had a complicated relationship and missed the opportunity to deeply connect around that. I was forced to have compassion for him, largely after his death, if I wanted to have any meaningful evolution and closure in our relationship. I certainly wasn’t going to get anything from him!
Compassion takes away most of the power that other people’s words and actions have on us. It is the ultimate ego surrender. To have compassion for people who are harming you, or people that are being assholes to you, illuminates the humanity in that person. It connects your humanity with theirs, improving the world one understanding relationship at a time.
Back to the writing practice. I don’t even want to look at how long it’s been.
It really is true – it’s not about how many times you fall down, it’s about how many times you get back up.
I’ve already abruptly stopped this a few times. Personal chaos, bad habit creep, and now war.
All of these things have been excuses to stop doing the core things that I want to be doing.
I could have used the fact that I’ve already slipped to say ‘fuck it’ and entirely give up. That’s when the massively negative self talk comes in:
“you’re no good”
“you can’t stick with anything”
“your writing is bad anyway”
But today I didn’t let that win. Today I got back up, got out of bed early, journaled, did my gratitude practice, and exercised. And I avoided milk in my coffee which gives me brain fog.
Those simple things that are sometimes so hard to do, when it feels like all I want to be doing is doomscrolling about Israel-Palestine. Or using the fact that I slept poorly as an excuse to sleep in and not exercise.
All of these things compound in either direction – good or bad. It can be tough to break the cycle and turn the tide back to good.
But as long as we keep trying to break the cycle. As long as we keep getting back up….
This post feels kinda shitty. I guess I better practice again tomorrow 😉
I started saying this in my head recently and it really works.
This technique is kind of like a gratitude technique but it’s much more interesting. Gratitude is almost passive. Thinking that you’re fucking cool is a much more active approach to being present and interested in everything going on in your day to day life.
I really mean to actually think “my life is really fucking cool and the fact that I’m doing the thing I’m doing right this very second, or dealing with whatever problem this is right now, is really fucking cool and I’m cool and this is a cool person’s life that I’m living”.
I haven’t yet experimented with this theory at the funeral of a family member or in the hospital or during a divorce, so it has a few stress tests that need to happen before it is officially out of beta.
But for now it seems to work and I love thinking it. Even about mundane things. And it has nothing to do with what society thinks is cool, or even what I think is cool.
I’m sitting here and ‘blogging’, and typing on this computer – it’s raining outside and I just had coffee. Fuck that’s cool. I think I’m partially zooming out and looking at myself like I’m in a movie and I’m the main character. This is the ‘blogging at the desk while it’s raining outside scene’ and it’s fucking cool and so many people wish they could be doing it.
It’s a work in progress. And the fact that I’m working on thought processes that make everything I do cool, is it fact fucking cool as hell.
I slipped a disc in my back a couple of years ago. I had been exercising every morning for years and was in very good shape. The disc completely fucked me up – couldn’t walk, horrible nerve pain.
In the last couple of years I’ve bounced back. I can move around normally and I’m more flexible and my core is much stronger than it ever has been. But I would still get some sciatica every time I’d work out.
I’d try to work out a couple of mornings in a row but my sciatica would flare up and then I’d take a week off. I think subconsciously I was scared and discouraged by the pain. Nerve pain is fucking brutal. Now mind you I was still doing jiujitsu and salsa dancing and bicycling to get around, so I was active – but that every morning workout regimen really fell by the wayside.
I’m proud to say that I’ve recently picked that regimen back up, and I feel incredible. There was some sciatica at the beginning but I think I’m over the hump. Movement is the way out of that kind of stuff and I was subconsciously limiting my movement. You have to lean into the pain to overcome it. I started doing 5-10 mins of stretching at night as well.
The effects of this regular exercise are more powerful than I remember. I can function on less sleep. I can wake up, do my morning gratitude and meditation routine, go to the bathroom, and exercise without having coffee. I feel much more alert and alive.
The original title of this post was “The Power of Exercise” but I think the lesson here is about leaning into pain. The only way out is through.
Not such a cheery title, but it’s true. And thinking about it can help us live a better and more present life.
It’s from Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations“, which is chock full of stoic wisdom.
He says something to the effect of, “The river is flowing. Everything is dying.”
I felt it today getting started on a morning run. Boy were my muscles sore.
I felt it today in the blustery morning, Fall whispering to us, leaves already beginning to drop, foreshadowing the turning of time.
I’m hearing it in a friend who’s stressed about having to care for her aging parent. Soon we may be the parents, and eventually the ones who need care.
We are currently in the Hebrew month of Elul, the month leading into Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, the holiest days of the year for Jews where we take stock of our lives this past year and set intentions for the coming year.
There are poems that are read on these days in synagogues around the world, framing life as a passing shadow, a disappearing cloud, a fading flower.
It seems morbid, but every time I read something like that or think about it, it instantly makes me present and grateful. I say the ‘river is flowing’ thing every morning as part of a gratitude practice and it works.
Try it. Wake up to your life and the fact that it is ending.