Perhaps this is a dampener and perhaps starting with a dampener isn't such a good idea; but I wasn't able to achieve my last year's resolution - it involved growing my hair and donating them to charity. I wasn't able to do it, it just got yuckier and yuckier and made me feel awfully unpresentable and un-fresh, and finally I googled the best hair-dressers in my town and went to them for a hair cut and some colour. On the other hand, I was able to keep my resolution for the year before - I quit coffee for a year. I love coffee, it was a big thing - but I was able to substitute coffee with other caffeinated drinks and so it worked. Perhaps the idea is that resolutions need to be planned properly. You need to have a great understanding of how any habit supports your life, and how you are going to contain the shifts that will arise when you shake it. It is suddenly dawning upon me that I have never been able to ride to work in the mornings because it involved changing a lot of things, all at once. Sleeping on time/Waking up on time/Having Breakfast/Organising my clothes and sundries the day before - you are right, I might as well, try world peace while I am at it ;)
So, this year, I am planning on being steady. Starting at a pace that can be maintained and then keep going. I first got this idea from that awesome book that I have already quoted from, Cadence by Emma Ayres, where she talks about starting riding at a pace that could be sustained for the next 150 kilometres for the day. Then, of course, when you are thinking of something, you start seeing the same message everywhere, I saw it again today,
"The biggest mistake I see in people newly starting out is that they take off too quickly. Remember, this is not a sprint; this is an exercise to remain in continual forward motion until the target time-goal has been reached. Even a highly trained athlete would find it challenging to sprint full speed for five continuous minutes. That is not the objective here. The purpose is to train yourself to regulate your pace to remain in nonstop motion until the requisite time you've established for yourself has been achieved."
(Dean Karnazes via the Fitbit blog)
It makes sense, in fact, much more than that - I tried it earlier this year (post-Cadence) and found it to be fantastic.
The other thing that I have been thinking about is meditation, as in, and exercise of the mind that makes it clearer (or purer or less confused or less all-over-the-place) and stronger (See here, if you like) and I am thinking of doing meditation at everything that I do - bringing my mind to whatever I am doing, no matter how it wants to get distracted with everything else - as coffeemug says, "a game that is trivial to learn and unbelievably difficult to master."
With my past successes and failures at keeping resolutions, and I must say, I have had an even success/failure rate, I have also realised one of the corner stones of this whole experience/exercise is the reasons of why we chose to take up a resolution. Emma Ayres said she rode across continents for 12 months because she didn't want to get to the age of 95 and regret not having done this. Our hypothetical 95 year old self usually knows what stuff will get dropped by the side, and what is so important that we'll always carry it in ourselves, even till we are 95 - if we live to be that old.
No comments:
Post a Comment