Tag Archives: reflection

Back on track

I ended up only shooting arrows once, last week, for the entire month of March… and I didn’t shoot well. Today I was back on track.

My personal best is a 289. Today I short a 288 in my first round, with no 8’s (all gold):

Then I shot a 287 in my second round with two 8’s, but also my first three X round in a while:

I made a couple minor adjustments since my last outing and they seemed to really work for me. Now I just need to get back to shooting a bit more regularly, and I think very soon I can break into the 290’s. I’m approaching one year (April 25th) since I first hit 289, and so I hope to crack this before my 1 year anniversary.

If I keep shooting this consistently, I’m sure a new personal best is within reach!

Blog posts from the past

I have been writing daily since July 2019, but I have had a blog since 2006. Yesterday I had a Facebook memory that was a blog post I wrote in 2010, while on vacation in Vietnam.

The Trap is a post that looks at tourist traps that hook you into buying souvenirs, and then equates this to some of the trappings we find in school like the textbook and resources that become the only thing that is taught. Re-reading my post yesterday, I was brought back in time to my adventures, and it made me think about how enriching travel is. We really expand our horizons and see things from different perspectives when we travel to foreign lands. The post shared a link to an earlier post, Bubble Wrap, that starts off, “After a month in China, I’ve come to realize that North Americans live in a bubble wrapped world,” and looks at how we try to (over) protect kids.

Being exposed to different places and cultures really expands and enriches our perspective. Visiting our writing from years ago allows us to see the influence that these experiences have given us. I miss traveling and feel like there is so much of the world still to explore… and to feed me creative things to write about. I don’t see a lot of travel in my near future, but I think I’ll do a little reflection on some of travel I have done, and revisit some memories that are still present, but slowly starting to fade. I haven’t revisited a lot of my past writing in a while either, so I think I’ll do that too.

Sticking to what works

On New Year’s Eve I shared my Healthy living goals reflection 2021. In this post I essentially said that I’m sticking with my old goals, with just a couple minor adjustments. Since then, this decision has bugged me a bit. I have felt a bit like I should have been more ambitious.

But this morning I realized that my goals are great. I have worked hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle the past few years and I’ve done far better than I have for a couple decades before that. Why should I add to this and push myself in a way that makes it hard to meet my daily goals?

I need to realize that when it comes to self care, maintaining a good plan is better than constantly striving to do more. It’s better to stick with what works than it is to push myself to a point where it gets too hard to achieve daily. Working out can include tougher workouts if I’m inclined, but I just had a few workouts that were really hard, then my body was begging for a rest. The soreness actually affected my sleep. That’s not healthy.

I’m not saying I won’t push myself every now and then, but I do need to realize that maintaining a good plan is better than creating a too challenging plan that I’ll give up on. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.

My healthy living goals are really good. They have worked wonders for me for the past 3 years, and I need to accept that sticking with the same goals is an achievement, and not something I need to feel disappointed about because I didn’t add more to them.

Healthy living goals reflection 2021

It’s that time of year again when I look back at my healthy living goals sticker chart, and also plan for next year.

This was the post at the end of 2020. And this was for 2019, the year I started this.

2021 in review:

Workouts: 287days or 78.6%

Writing: Daily blog 100%

Meditation: 346 days or 94.8%

Archery: 129 days or 35.3% (Goal was 100 days so actually 129%.)

This was an awesome year for fitness. I am about 6-8 pounds heavier, with a fair bit of increase in size in my upper body and small but noticeable increases in my quads. I feel fit and strong, and I think I only had a couple minor slow downs from back pain, with minimal recovery time. I still need to stretch more, and I still rely a bit too much on deep massage therapy to keep the pain away, but I know that slow, careful strength progress, and more time using my standing desk at work, has significantly reduced the amount of regular pain I’ve had to deal with in my lower back.

Last year I did one more workout in the year… but it was a leap year so I’m going to call it even. I hope to maintain this next year too. Working out slightly more than 3 out of every 4 days for a full year is an excellent goal.

My daily blog has been going strong since July 2019… and while I could probably stop tracking this, I want to keep it as a goal for next year. The chart is a good motivator, and there is nothing wrong with having one of my goals be something that I commit to every single day.

Meditation: I missed 13 days from January to November, and 6 more in December. It has not been a good month for meditation. My goal this year was supposed to be tracking days when I meditate more than once to increase my time. I did this 6 times in January and didn’t continue. It did not become a habit. This year I want to increase the total time by going longer than 10 minutes on weekends, and doing more self-guided meditations mid week, so that mini lessons on the Calm App are not part of my meditation time. This is a more realistic way to take my daily meditation to the next level.

Archery was a new goal this year and I hoped to shoot a total of 100 days. I’m thrilled that I hit 129 days, and my goal next year will be 120.

So, no new goals next year, just a couple adjustments on my current goals. I do plan to write more, but I’m going to calendar that, rather than chart it. So 2022 will be about keeping the good habits going… if you have a few goals you’d like to track, buy yourself a year long calendar and make it happen! (Here are my tips.)

May your 2022 be amazing!

Post in a tweet about gratitude

Sometimes a tweet can become a post:

Yesterday was a long day at work where I barely got out of my office. Then I ended the day with a frustrating meeting that was supposed to be a Q&A to learn more about ministry changes coming. But the questions left unanswered had me baffled as to why these sweeping changes are happening so quickly?

So before leaving, I sat for a moment and thought, what am I grateful for? I wrote that tweet, and instantly felt better about my day.

Sometimes it just takes a moment of gratitude, or a simple tweet of gratitude, to change your outlook on a day.

The most powerful paradoxes of life

I just read this thread of tweets by Sahil Bloom and it needs to be shared! Click on the tweet and read them all. More than one will speak to you. These are indeed paradoxes that you will have experienced and understood intuitively at some point in your life.

Beyond that, I’ll let them speak for themselves:

Another trip around the sun

Today I turn 54. I’m starting my 55th rotation around sun on this tiny blue rock. While I have been taking good care of myself and feel great, I also realize that there are things that time does to your body that are irreversible… like my hairline. 🤣

On a more serious note, it amazes me that I am now older than my parents were when I left home and headed to BC. They were in their late 40’s when I left. That means the vast majority of my memories of being in my family home are memories of parents who were spring chickens compared to me now.

How did I get here? Time passes so quickly. Five years ago retirement seemed a lifetime away, now it’s actually something my wife and I are planning for. 10 years ago ago I had 2 kids that weren’t even teenagers yet, and in a few months my youngest will be 20 and once again I won’t have any teenagers.

I feel blessed for having the life I’ve had, and I look forward to a lot more (hopefully healthy and happy) years ahead. I just marvel in the fact that so many years have gone by so quickly, and time seems to be speeding up.

I don’t usually think much about birthdays. The one birthday that made me sad we my 36th. A couple days after that birthday I had to fill out a form and the checkbox for my age went from ages 36-54. That put me in the dumps. I felt all depressed that I was now lumped in with the 50-year olds. Now that I’m at the tail end of that category, I simply look forward to what comes next.

Hairline be damned, it is going to recede and turn more grey no matter what. But I’m hopping on my exercise bike this morning, I’m going to shoot some arrows, and I’m going to have a wonderful family dinner. It’s a good day to appreciate the gift of life, and to use the time I have well, as I rocket towards this spot on the earth’s orbit again in another year.

Pause and think

A few days ago a quote was said in my morning meditation,

“Mindfulness is a pause – The space between stimulus and response: That’s where choice lies.” ~ Tara Brach

It’s amazing how seldom we give ourselves the time and space to pause, especially when we are making decisions. We feel the urge to respond, to fix, to appease, to vent, to impose, and most of all to decide… without a lot of thought, without reflection, and without hesitation… without being mindful.

“Let me think about that.”

“I’m not sure, give me a bit of time.”

“Let me ask a few people how they’ve handled situations like this.”

“I’ll get you an answer by the end of the day.”

Often a thoughtful delay brings a far better response than a knee-jerk reaction. Gut instinct can work, but our gut need not be the default decision-maker, when contemplation can provide us with insights not immediately available to us.

Sometimes a slow and thoughtful response can help things settle down a bit and reduce the tension or the anxiety around addressing the actual problem, rather than creating more problems by dealing with the symptoms of an issue and not the underlying problem itself… a problem that would be easy to solve, if we just allowed ourselves a little time to think.

We live in a time warp

When you are 10, 5 years is half a lifetime. 10 years is half your life at 20, and 20 years is half your life at 40.

By the time you hit 40, your first 20 years are a distant memory, and you remember choice moments, but you don’t remember those years like when you were younger. The distance in time causes you to lose your ability to hold on to old memories. You can’t hold an ever accumulating amount of memories, and so some fade away. So time stretches the past into a distance too far to see everything.

Meanwhile, 1 year at 10 used to be 1/10 of your life. A year at 20 is 1/20th of your life and a year at 40 is 1/40th of your life. Each year, the lengths of a year as compared to the rest of your life diminishes. So time also shrinks the future while it stretches the past. We live in a time warp, and time goes by faster every day.

Sometimes it’s good to reflect on this, if only just to appreciate the fleeting moments in a day, and know that unless we appreciate the time we have, we can only appreciate the memories that we know will fade away.

Sharing and reflecting

I’m really enjoying my Facebook memories popping up. My daughters save memories on Snapchat and I also enjoy the memories they share from years ago. This morning a Facebook memory of me being at school late at night popped up and I took the 10+ minutes to watch it now, 4 years later.

Here it is:

It is interesting to hear my thoughts on the power of Microsoft Teams a few years before the pandemic made this a regular way to meet.

It’s exciting to be reminded of the school photo wall I’ve done a number of times in my career. I think I’ll get the wheels in motion and do this again this year.

It’s embarrassing that despite my enthusiasm to reengage with a MOOC, I’m still a MOOC dropout all these years later. But at least I made it to week 3.

The biggest takeaway is that we live in a world where it is easy to share, and when we share our memories, we get to enjoy them all over again. These digital reminders of our past allow us not just to connect with others, but also to connect with otherwise forgotten memories.