Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
The best part of this whole pandemic has been that I have been outside on walks far more that I have in years. Just got back from the usual 5k walk I take with my wife, and we also did a masked walk with a couple, who are close friends, last night. There is something cathartic about walking and talking. Equally so, walking alone and thinking, or even listening to music, or a podcast or an audio book. I don’t know why walks are so enjoyable, but they make me feel great.
Get outside. Go for a walk. So what if it’s dark, take a flashlight or a bike light with you. So what if it’s raining or snowing, wear appropriately dry/warm clothing. So what if you don’t have someone’s go with, walk alone. Whatever the path you may be on, part of it can be walked.
Yesterday after school I had a long conversation with a friend, and he shared some feedback I really needed to hear. I’ve been on a healthy living journey for a couple years now, and things have been going well. But as we opened up to each other about how things are going, I mentioned to him that there is a goal that I’m just not moving forward with. I told him that despite 2 years of things being positive, I can’t seem to make a shift with this goal.
That’s when he told me to give myself a break.
He reminded me that although I’ve been improving my health, I have not been on a fully positive journey for two years. He remained me that it wasn’t until February, just under a year ago, that I was running 3 schools, working ridiculous hours, and feeling overwhelmed. He reminded me that only a few weeks after that we were on lockdown for a global pandemic we are still dealing with.
He acknowledged that I’m in a good place, meeting many of my goals and that even now work is extremely busy. And he told me that he has mentioned me to his partner, telling her that I’m someone that is really doing well right now. And he told me that he knows many others not doing nearly as well right now.
I needed to hear this.
I can’t beat myself up for not doing more right now. I need to give myself a break.
Then I went to Facebook and commented on a post about a friend, George, who shared his healthy living before/now photos showing his progress. He started by saying,
“For the last year, I have been adding a āprogress checkā to my Instagram stories for my workouts. I have been teased about it, but It was a way for me to see a difference over time when it is hard to notice the impact of your work on a daily basis. Snapshots over time have given me a better idea of my progress.”
My response:
George, this is fantastic! I love seeing progress photos like this. Whatās great is that you arenāt just dropping weight, you are creating a healthy lifestyle. As for sharing the photos… GO FOR IT!
Kelly, Jonathan, and I post workouts on Twitter and cheer each other on. Iām sure some people roll their eyes, but I firmly believe that being public pushes us when we need that push. There is both incentive and accountability to being public about our healthy living goals. You look awesome, and you will look awesome a year from now rather than yo-yo-ing… so share away!
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I know that my Healthy Living Goals have been positively impacted by my being open and sharing them publicly on not just my blog, but also on social media.
What I also notice is that I used to get tons of comments on my blog, and now they are all over the place. My blog gets shared to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn automatically when the post is published, and people will comment and respond on those platforms rather than on my blog. These comments live at a given moment, they don’t live on my blog, connected to my post, like Aaron’s comment(s) do.
Social media timelines scroll past for brief moments in time. You could argue that so do blog posts.. especially when they come daily, but I like the idea that these posts share easily searchable and longer living moments in time. And, if and when I go back to them, I like the idea that the comments are there with the post and not lost on my social media timeline, never to be connected to the post again.
But social media rules the day. I’d probably get 1/10 the readership of my blog if I didn’t post it on social media, and social media is designed to keep you on the platform… to keep you engaged and scrolling, and interacting on the site. I don’t think that will change any time soon.
There have been a couple instances where a blog comment on social media added enough value to the conversation or idea shared in my post that it inspired me to quote that comment myself, in the blog comments. However, it wouldn’t be sustainable for me to try to do that all the time. I don’t really have a solution, I think it’s just a matter of accepting that people will choose to comment on social media sites, and blogs are not as social (anymore).
I get up an hour or more before my wife. She’s a light sleeper and even set at its quietest, my alarm will often wake her up. So every night I tell myself to wake up before my alarm. Probably 3 out of 5 weekdays I do. Most times it’s within 20 minutes of it going off, but some days, like today, it was almost 45 minutes early.
When I wake up way too early, I always have to juggle the decision of what to do. If I’m over an hour early, the choice is simple, I get up and go down to the couch. There I can sleep for another hour and let my alarm wake me. If it’s 20 minutes or less, I just get up. But those in-between days like today are tough to decide what to do?
If I head to the couch with only 40 minutes to spare, I will re-wake up after my couch nap feeling like I need more sleep. If I just wake up, I feel like my sleep was too short. A day like today means that I would have slept for less than 6 hours. But if I go back to sleep in my bed, there’s a good chance that I won’t wake up again before my alarm, and I know I’ll wake my wife up unnecessarily.
That window of waking up 25 to 55 minutes too early is a window that’s hard to deal with. Today I closed my eyes and ended up checking the time twice before getting out of bed 12 minutes before my 5:15am alarm. I came downstairs and set a timer to go off in 12 minutes, then started my 10 minute, timed meditation. I sometimes fall back asleep after my meditation, when I get up before my alarm.
These morning rituals that I have, for when I wake up before my alarm, have been developed over time. Sometimes the routine is natural, sometimes it’s a struggle. Part of the struggle is that I’m still half asleep when I’m making the decision of what to do. Sometimes I tell myself to get up, or to go downstairs, and I don’t. This could lead to my alarm going off, or to me half-waking up several more times and then waking up tired.
As I finish this, I hear my wife is up in the bedroom above. She has been getting up earlier than normal to work out. That’s what I’m headed to do too. Meditation, writing, 20 minutes cardio listening to an audio book, light stretching, and one or two sets of weights. By the time I head to the shower, I feel that I’ve already had a good day. It helps when I can start off getting up 20 minutes or less before my alarm.
Shot some arrows again today. I’ve been shooting at very close range, and working on my release. Then I decided to go back to 18 meters and shoot a round: 10 ends of 3 arrows. The maximum score is 300. I haven’t shot a round in over a year and a half and my goal today was to get at least a 240. I shot a 252, on targets that go as low as a 6 ring, with only one of my 30 arrows not scoring.
(Some photo/scoring details: The cover photo with 3 bullseyes was taken at very close range, about 10m. The score card details: X is a bullseye and counts as 10. M is a miss. Scoring order is not by arrow order, but highest score first.)
My mentor/coach has advised me to make notes beyond my score and here they are:
I’ve started a photo album on my phone. I think that I want my notes to be pen on paper rather than digital, then I’ll take a photo of them and add them to my album after my score, or on the same page as my score. This may change over time.
What I’m most happy about, besides my initial goal of getting at least a score of 140 and getting a 152, is the 10,9,9 recovery after shooting a 8, 7, Miss. One of my goals with archery is to not let my previous shot affect my next shot. This is my favourite part about the sport… it’s unforgiving and doesn’t allow me to wallow and be upset, and still shoot well. I can’t stay ‘in my head’, and beat myself up, and shoot well.
So now I have a starting reference point for shooting a round at 18 meters. My next goal will be a 270, but I’m not putting a timeline on that target until I shoot and score a few more times. It would be arbitrary to set a timeline without knowing what my progression will be like. I could hit a lucky 270 in 2 weeks, or I could be stuck below 265 for the rest of the year. I have no idea where I’ll be or how hard this will be until I shoot and score a few more times.
It’s still early in the year, and enthusiasm is high, but I think I’ll hit my goal of 100 days of archery this year, and it will be exciting to see how much I can improve over this year.
Last year I chose Resilience as my #OneWord 2020. At the end of this post I said, “Resilience allows us to be strong, flexible, and engaged in a society that is the kind of society we want to live and thrive in.”
In October I re-shared the post adding, “Right now it seemslike I chose the right #OneWord for 2020: Resilience. But as you read my last post of 2019, written before we learned about the impending pandemic, remember somethingā¦ We are social beings and we are not incredibly resilient on our own. We need a community, we need friendship and love, we need each other.
Relationships, be they with family, friends, co-workers, student/teacher, and even pets, build our resilience, and our ability to not just cope, but to thrive.
Letās support one another and show our resilience together!”
Reflecting on this now, I realize that resilience is a word like endure: We want to be able to do it, but we don’t want to have to do so more than necessary. I want to be resilient, I don’t want to be constantly needing to show you how resilient I am. I don’t want to continually demonstrate my resilience… like I and many others have had to do as the world deals with this pandemic. So this year I want my #OneWord to be something I actually want to do, and to show.
Thrive!
Thrive is the word I have chosen for 2021. I want to feel like I’m thriving with my healthy living goals. I want to thrive at work and watch our students thrive too. I want my wife and daughters to thrive and feel like their work and school experiences are not just about coping, or showing resilience, but about feeling successful and accomplished.
I know the pandemic is far from over, and that we must continue to be diligent, careful, and safe going forward. That doesn’t mean that we can’t also make the most of things and live our best lives. That doesn’t mean that we can’t thrive. This is a power word, filled with the promise of doing well, no matter our consequences. There are circumstances and things we must deal with that are be beyond our personal control, and there are things we have control over and that we can do to make the most of our circumstances.
May 2021 be a year where you stay healthy, and positive, and find ways to truly THRIVE!
I used to hate the idea of new year’s resolutions. So much hype built into large and often unrealistic goals. But my healthy living goals have changed that. Today, I hit all my targets (literally with my archery goal as well as figuratively). And so I added my stickers to my chart, and am heading into my hot tub after writing this.
What matters though, as I have learned, is that I maintain my weekly goals when I’m busy at work. It’s easy to take a step in the right direction on the first day of the year, while on holiday. But this doesn’t prepare me for the year ahead like the first week back at school.
That doesn’t take anything away from my day, from the first day of 2021… it does remind me that habits are made when it’s hard to maintain habits, rather than when it’s easy. It reminds me that every step in the right direction is a good step to take.
I’ve made some great strides in meeting my healthy living goals in the past two years, and I believe I’ll do the same this year. It’s easier when I create goals that are actually attainable, and that make me feel better about myself. It’s also easier because I’ve created the time and space in my home schedule to meet my targets. The challenge isn’t doing what needs to be done, the challenge is consistently making time, and getting started. Consistently.
Last year: 63%(57% would have been an average of 4-days a week. I only did less than 4 days a week 3 times during the year.)
This year: 78.7% (288/366days or an average of 5.5 days a week. I only did less the 4 days twice and one of those was the week after I broke my patella.)
I barely missed mediation or a day of reading/writing. A difference of note to last year, I listened to 33 books in 2020. That’s up from 26 last year and included a lot more fiction than in previous years.
I was also consistent with intermittent fasting until I stopped doing this in October. I was dropping weight that I didn’t want to lose at that point. While at some point I might return to this form of time restricted eating, I think I’ve ingrained the habit of not snacking after dinner, but my early morning workouts leave me too hungry to do this when my last meal is usually done by 6:30pm. I’m over 25lbs lighter than I was 3 years ago and actually want to add some muscle mass this year.
Overall, I have to say that this has been a healthy year. Besides my accident, breaking my knee, I had a shoulder injury that was slow to recover, and my (chronic) back issues flared up only once for about a week. Besides that, I’d easily say that I’m the fittest I’ve been in 25+ years.
So where to now? Here’s my plan with my calendar and stickers for 2021:
Red: Exercise (continued) I know the visual of gaps in workouts pushes me. I will try to match this year’s average.
Blue: Meditation (continued +) I plan to continue to give myself a sticker for doing a guided meditation in the morning. But I also plan to give myself a second sticker if I can do a minimum of 10 minutes of unguided meditation sometime later in the day. I think for me to progress in my meditation I have to dedicate more time to staying focussed on my breath and commit to putting more hours into this.ļæ¼
Yellow: Writing. I don’t need to track reading anymore. I read (listen) during cardio and squeeze in more reading whenever I am doing menial tasks or driving alone. But I want to continue to advance my writing. So, one sticker for my Daily Ink blog post, and a second sticker when I do any writing beyond that. Let’s see if my sticker chart can inspire me to do more than just a daily post. At least to start, much of what I write beyond these posts may not be immediately public – so tracking with a 2nd sticker will keep me honest about how much of this I actually do).
Green: Archery. Goodbye intermittent fasting, hello hobby! After a year-and-a-half hiatus, I started shooting again and I’m loving it. It helps that I have a (socially distanced) friend coaching me a bit, and I’m seeing great results. To me this is a form of meditation. It’s also something that I started then watched get pushed asides due to being busy and not prioritizing. If I can get 100 days of shooting in next year, that would be amazing!
So while there are many reasons to throw 2020 the middle finger, I think that my healthy living sticker chart is not one of them. I know that without keeping myself honest with this system, 2020 could have been an abysmal year for my physical and mental well-being… but this charting and commitment to myself was a shining light in what was otherwise a very dark year. I hope to see equal success in 2021!
I’ve been reevaluating my healthy living goals over this holiday break. I’ve realized that I don’t need to track a few things that I was tracking on my healthy living chart.
The yellow sticker was originally for 20 minutes minimum reading (listening to books, not podcasts), and/or writing, which I didn’t do much of until the middle of 2019, when I started writing here daily. I don’t think I’ve missed a day of writing since, and I listed to 33 books this year. So, mission accomplished… and such a regular part of my day now that I really don’t need a sticker to track this behaviour.
Also, I started tracking intermittent fasting in 2019, and continued this year. I needed at least a 14 hour gap to earn a sticker. My original goal was 5 days a week with breaks on Friday and Saturday nights when I might have snacks or drinks after dinner. I think this is really healthy but I’ve been pushing myself on my morning workouts and actually struggling to keep weight on, after years of having too much weight on me. I am now my university weight and fitter than I’ve been in about 25 years. But I struggled once we hit September to go 14 hours on most days, and while I’d get close, tracking it seems moot, because I often felt self care was not the objective of holding off on getting some food in me and feeling strong.
My other stickers are exercise and meditation. I usually worked out 5 days a week, and I know that many weeks this year, when I missed 2 workouts early on, the lack of stickers that week really motivated me to exercise daily and keep going. So this sticker reward and tracking is really working for me.
For meditation, I have been doing 10 min. guided daily, and almost have a perfect record. There are some days when I would take too long writing and do a rushed workout and forget to meditate later, having skipped my morning routine. On this break, where I’m not getting up between 5 and 5:30am, I’ve remembered to meditate after 11pm on 3 different days. I think next year I’m going to try to meditate twice daily, once guided in the morning and once silently later in the day (at least 4 days a week). Then I’ll give myself a sticker for each, so I can contrast the amount of times I meditated twice, while also tracking if I skip both on a given day.
So where am I right now with my 2021 healthy living motivation chart?
Red: Workouts (continued)
Blue: Meditation (1 or 2 stickers)
Yellow: A writing goal that I haven’t figured out yet?
Green: I don’t know yet?
Starting this chart 2 years ago has been significant in me being able to create a healthy lifestyle that I’ve been able to monitor and maintain. It’s not a light choice to make, it’s a year of dedication with significant rewards to my personal health and mental well-being. So, over the next few days, I’ll have to solidify my last two targets… and there you have it, writing this has given me something new to track… archery. Now I just need to make my writing and archery goals specific and I’ll be all set for the new year!
I’m loving my return to archery. I now realize that when I readjust my healthy livingļæ¼ goals for 2021, they will need to include finding time to shoot arrows. Just like I created time for writing and exercise over the past couple years, I need to carve out some regular time to shoot. Over this week the first thing I’ll do is figure out a way to do so indoors at home… that’s not just safe, but safe in my wife’s eyes.
These last couple of sessions, I’ve been working on my release. With a compound bow, the goal is not to squeeze the trigger with your thumb, but rather to pull your entire arm back and have the back tension of your arm and hand cause your thumb to trigger the release. To do this, your hand needs to be relaxed, your thumb needs to be securely around the trigger, and your back tension should cause the release such that the release surprises you. Being comfortable with this surprise takes getting used to, and so does the idea of not squeezing your thumb.
Body:
It’s interesting when you learn a new skill how easy it is to fill your conscious mind with everything except what you need to focus on. I want to be surprised by the trigger release, but my body is waiting, anticipating it, and taking my attention away from my focus on my release. I want to relax my sight, and let the scope pin float around the target center, but my thumb bounces on the trigger when I see the pin dead center. I want to feel my arm pulling back but instead I realize that my thumb pushed down… only after I’ve taken the shot.
With any new physical skill, I find that my body awareness is my biggest challenge. In the past, when I’ve gone to a core fitness class, the Physio guiding us would adjust my body during an exercise and say, ‘Do you feel the difference?’ Usually my response is ‘No’. I need to look at a mirror and practice the difference, but I don’t feel it.
And Mind:
With archery, I’m starting to feel the difference… but I have to be both focussed and relaxed: Focussed enough to be paying attention to as little as possible, honing in on just my release and not anything else that distracts me; Relaxed enough that I am genuinely surprised by the release, and not in a heightened state of preparation for it. The state of being simultaneously focussed and relaxed is not easily attained.
It’s about unifying body and mind. Having both act as one.
