Patience

Friday update!

I didn't write much this week. It was mostly a week of reflection on that front, trying to compose the next pieces in my head before air commit them here. I began to get nervous, I was sweating that I wasn't keeping up with my goals. That I was slipping and that I would begin to just give it up and head back over to Facebook.

I might have even made two posts over there this week. It wasn't anywhere near my 2--3 or more a day I used to make, and I certainly wasn't  doing the deep dives through friends of friends to find the Rando who posted the insensitive comment on a friend of a friend's wall. The habits have changed with enough attention. It required time, effort and diversion to a different behavior. It took work. It took me looking at myself with stern kindness. It took patience.

I know this lesson well, although how to really apply it to self improvement has only come in the last few years (and I am sure I'll find another aspect another time in my life). It's something I have always done, although it has usually been a function of control rather than a true attempt to assist. I would use my will as a hammer, smashing though objections and scattering people and ideas like kindling. I was kind of an asshole about it, especially to myself.

So when it came time to do something about all of this, I had to use that tool the way I always had. I used that on myself. It led me to some dark places during the first bits of this effort. I was impatient with myself when I would fail. I probably hurt myself a few times in that, though the results were there.

Eventually I came to the point where I plateaued hard. I was at just above 400 for weeks. I tried everything I could think of and it just wasn't coming. I was mad at myself for my failure, but no amount of railing against it would change the fact that I was jot able to get lower. I began to despair that I would ever find success. That continued until I remembered that I can only control certain aspects of my self and that I needed to forgive myself and apply my will only to those things I could control.

I looked for the small changes I could make to bring small successes. I stopped bashing myself for the failures and I started encouraging myself to go forward. In short, everything I knew I haf learned about being patient with others I needed to apply to myself.

It worked. I broke through 400 and am on the bring of my first really big goal.l, but I find myself on a plateau yet again. Under 360 is eluding me and I find myself falling into the old habits of bashing myself for the failure. I need to stop that, because it's leading to some poor decisions in my despair, especially now I know sugar is not as immediate a concern anymore.

I drank a sugared soda.  I have been eating more carbs. I even considered candy.

That's the part I need to stop. I need to be stern on the hard line on sugar and carbs while forgiving myself for the slips. It's a journey, and I need to find the trail again.

I need patience.

363

Faster

Friday update!

"Hey, could you walk a little slower?"  I hadn't  heard that in about a decade. I've heard it four times in the last week.

I suppose I could just leave the Friday update there and declare victory, but it's so much more than that. Those words represent some pretty cool things to me.

In my unhealthy state I was obviously not walking much. This meant that when I did walk it was usually going to be with others because,  well,  that's just how people were getting top whatever.  I was slower than everyone.

With my team at work,  I ended up nearly a block behind on a four block wall to a restaurant.  With friends I would beg for breaks and for them to slow down,  and woe unto me if folks wanted be to go hiking.

Now it's full speed ahead at an average of just above three miles an hour regardless of terrain. Up hills, down hills, across mud, whatever,  I walk. My legs pumping out a rhythm to match the music in my ears when I am exercising keep that rhythm when I am just walking now, too, but that rhythm is a little faster than some.

It's a small thing, walking faster, but it's a victory for me. It represents one more embarrassment falling away. One more thing I hated about how my body was and isn't any more.

Between this and people I haven't seen in a couple years commenting on how I "look great" with the weight loss I might even begin to believe I am getting back to being in shape. Let's see about dance and fencing next.

Change

Those points where what was, becomes what is. The edge of destruction and creation. The only constant we have. It is a source of joy and fascination for me. It sweeps away the old and allows me to bring those things within which I have nurtured.

I see it in the world around me right now. The trees wake up, the grass turns a little brighter green and the flowers push their heads above the mud. Spring and fall represent the Flux I look forward to every day.

It is in stagnation that I find personal death. The comfort of the known necessitates a lack of growth. It may be safe, but it doesn't allow me to progress. Progress may be messy, and it may hurt a bit, but it is the only guarantee that I will be resilient when change is forced rather than sought after.

For all my hubris and love of self control, I find it impossible to reliably predict where change will happen in my own life. I am left only with the sense of wonder that change should be surprising in any fashion. It is a thing which requires me to change within to adapt, and those things are awesome.

Adaptation is the single largest driver in the natural world. Those things which are able to change and adapt to a changing world are the most guaranteed to survive into the future.

So I embrace change. I adapt. I embrace the growth it brings in the world and within myself. I will not shrink from progress and from seeing people as they are and as they grow. I reject the simple path of obstruction and I will adapt those obstructions to my own growth.

I look at the trees and flowers for inspiration. Over the difficult times, they hibernate and gather their strength. I reflect and think, gathering my own mental and emotional fortitude. Then, with an incredible alacrity, they explode in growth. I will reflect that as well. After reflection comes action, otherwise it is simply mental masturbation.

Over the past couple of years, that change and growth has been largely personal.  As my daughter heads into her future, I am left with a sense of change within myself. For the past 20 years, I have defined myself as her father. Every ounce of effort was for her benefit. An expensive natural effort born of evolutionary expediency. Now I have to decide for myself what I am next.

Yes, sure, a parent's job is never really complete, but you know what I mean. It requires I change. That I grow. That I reflect and explode. In that process I look to my oust and the growth I put on hold. I look to the future and the things I don't know that I don't know and I am excited for both the daughter and myself. We both get a chance to grow.

And growth is what it's all about.

Windfall

Taxmas is a thing. It came about in my house because being a technical contractor meant not having paid time off, and being a technical contractor meant not making enough to really get ahead to be able to save up for that big gift. It also meant having to tell your kid that the big presents would have to wait a month or two... for Taxmas.

It's not just about the gifts, of course, it's about any larger purchase. Things get outdated, break, or just plain wear out. Clothes get torn and can't be replaced (let's talk about big people and clothes at thrift stores some time), phones stop working, cars stop running and the only thing which can possibly rescue these things comes in the form of a windfall.

We're told we shouldn't spend them. After all, they're for your hard times, or your retirement, or you should change your withholding so you get that small amount more per check instead of all at once. We're told by politicians that we don't deserve assistance because we bought a new couch or phone instead of buying insurance or we bought steak and lobster one day to try to lift the oppressive air and have a small luxury to make us just a little happier.

But that's the thing. When you're poor, every time is a lean time. You get so used to getting by with so little and bending over backwards to stretch your income as far as it can go that when you get that windfall, it's like candy. Eating all the candy at once might be bad for you in the long run, but when you haven't had any for the rest of the year, someone plunking down a snickers bar in front of you brings on feelings of doubt.

Add to that the fact that every store in poor neighborhoods knows you just got your tax return. They rely on it. They advertise for it. They want you to spend it and they have sales designed specifically to take advantage of the fact that you have money you usually don't. You could call it free market economy or a symptom of further economic oppression, but it's real either way. The very thing we shouldn't do, we're encouraged to do... so we do.

We get the new used car and pay cash for the means to get to work. We buy the new phone because not having one means we miss the calls which can lead to better times. We rent to own the new couch because the only thing we have to sit on is folding chairs and pillows (yes, I've been there).  And then we're judged for it.

Now I stand on the middle of the financial scale for the first time in my adult life. A windfall now means an amount of money old me would never be able to conceive of having all at once. Bills vanish, savings can happen and there can still be money left over, so... I don't know what to do. My instinct is to buy new things, but other than the new computers to replace the ones nearing 6 years old nd some new clothes to fit the changing body there's only luxuries to buy. It's a strange place to be for me.

Maybe this year, we won't have to wait until February to celebrate Christmas morning.

Choices

Friday update!

I did it!

I successfully managed to make reasonable choices this week.  Yes, I did give in to some small items, like a piece of a friend's first attempt at making truffles and a spoonful of ice cream, but by and large, it was successful.  I managed to keep to my habits and even improve some of them.

That's the thing I love about this attempt over the others.  By maintaining strict dietary restrictions for long enough, I now can gauge more accurately where I can make those small cheats and not have an overall negative effect.  I can also be reasonably assured that my choices will keep in mind the overall goal.  In short, character matters and discipline is finally a thing. It took me long enough!

If I am honest, I feel like I am on the other side of a very long struggle with myself. All of the self doubt and negativity I have felt for so long is beginning to slough off.  I still have a good amount of anxiety around a lot of things, but honestly?  This journey is showing me things about myself I had forgotten.  It has shown me my strength again, and I am loving it.

In this case, I do actually mean physical strength as well as mental and emotional fortitude.  I can lift and carry a significant amount.  Things others say are heavy are... kind of?  I can jump and duck and even run if I have to.  I can easily step over gaps that even a few scant months ago, I would have doubted my ability to cross.  I am stretching my abilities on the daily by continuing to meet and exceed exercise goals (116% of goals recorded on my phone last week), and I am killing it on the walking.

I had lost track of my walking limits.  You know, the amount of distance I can walk before my legs say "um, dude?  Let's not anymore."  When I first started this journey, it was all about the walking... because I really couldn't.  A simple quarter mile on somewhat flat surface was excruciatingly winding.  My heart would be beating and I could barely catch my breath.  I was worried. That, along with the now removed threat of diabetes were my primary motivations.  Well, that and seeing a picture of myself which showed just how out of shape I really had become.  Either way, those limits were hard.  They were holding me back and they had to be challenged.

So challenge them I did.  This past week, I have found the new one.  about 2.5 miles of walking over an hour period with two small rests of about five minutes each is what my legs can do now.  Sure, it's no 5k and it's not even close to a good hiking trip, but it's awesome to me. It represents progress.  It represents greater freedom.  It inspires me to keep pushing, to keep making these good choices which are increasing my confidence and helping drive back the demons of depression.

Maybe, finally, I can start looking forward.  It's my choice to do so.

362

Prohibition

We've been through all this before. A substance being spurned by those in high office responding to political and financial pressures of their supposed moral high ground. It's been tried. It failed.

It's been linked directly to a massive uptick in organized crime, the deaths of thousands, the criminalizing of people who just want to have some harmless fun, and the rise in popularity of thumbing your nose at the man and putting on your fine clothes to drink bathroom gin and dance to some pretty rocking tunes.

They said it was harmful. They said it was a scourge upon the land and a wounder of her people. They said the stuff was the driver of crime and indolence. It kept people in poverty and it only benefited criminals. That it was only the right thing to do to make it illegal.

They weren't entirely wrong,  the stuff does have real effects which can cause some people to react in ways counter to their own self interest. It can be addictive, and those disposed to the cycles of addiction would do best not to engage in its use. It is that addiction which can cause harm. It is that addiction which should be treated.

But, you know, they don't see it that way.  They want to criminalize things. They want to lock people away because they are afraid. They are afraid the people with addiction will destroy the country because they... use pot.

They want to re-fight the same war that tore families apart and decimated lives. That tore up entire communities in a thirst to provide for a taste people are going to puruse. That destroyed entire communities in a thirst to make money by locking them up.

Yes, we've been here before. With alchohol, in the 80s and 90s with the war on drugs he mentioned, in the 2000s, and it could be argued that we were only beginning to dig back from policies that, frankly, we're targeted towards the poor and the hardest hit were people of color.

But remember: when it comes to the poor, no lives matter to them and it is now clear the overwhelming voice of the people wanting a thing don't matter either.

By the people indeed.

Limits

The edges of what we can accomplish have always fascinated me. Records stand at those edges, tantalizingly out of reach to those striving to be the best at a thing. They keep us from harm and they keep us from success. They are  the most we can do.

When we approach those limits, our body and mind let us know, and we can choose to push. We ignore the warnings of fatigue, mental fog and emotional fragility so we can do more. That's what it's about to me, doing more.

But those limits are that hard edge. It's only through perseverance and dedication that we can actually push through those edges into new territory.  We feel the pain and embrace it in the name of improvement.

Whether it be learning a new language or getting up at a new time, those edges will be highly personal. Each one of us has our own limits imposed on us by our minds and bodies, but there are other limits.

We have our moral and ethical edges, those things we hold to as true. The core of our beliefs  are hard limits. We defend them once established and challenging them is hard. After all, belief is one of the strongest things a human does. It establishes our reality. It also establishes our society.

The limits of a society are different. We go from the personal to the aggregate really fast. Homogeny of belief is at the core of people. When we are talking about societal change, stretching beyond the edges becomes a matter for decades.

When I stretch my personal limits, I get sore legs for a few days. When a society tries to stretch itself beyond its limits, the pain comes out in some terrible ways. People get hurt in the pushing and in the backlash.

But push we must. Whether it be personal, interpersonal, emotional, physical or societal, we must drive ourselves to do better: to *be* better. It is only through the finding and moving of our limits that we can improve.

And we have to be better. Always.