Many Moves to Make

On Saturday, I made it to the gym for my yearly workout - the most expensive session in the world. Well, it isn't that bad, as it is a very cheap gym and my work covers most of the costs, but still, it is a waste to only make it there every year or so, especially since it is only about two klicks from home. As I have mentioned before, I have been struggling heavily with motivation and one of the many things affected is my desire to move, which is depressing, considering I used to be a person that would often enough do 6-7 workouts a week, sometimes two in a day.

Getting back into the groove is a challenge.

It all pretty much went downhill after my daughter was born, though I shouldn't use her as an excuse. The first year after her birth is what I would call "rough" and once out of that groove, I never really recovered to get back into it again. Twenty years of consistency, down the drain, because I wasn't getting enough sleep or time to myself to travel a few kilometers for a workout. It isn't that I couldn't get there of course, but it dropped down on my hierarchy of things to do very quickly and now, pushing it back up the list has proven difficult.

I am sure I am not the only one.

It is one of those force things I believe, where essentially, like it or not, I just have to get my ass up off the couch every day and drag myself there. Once there, it is pretty easy to actually do something, it is the getting out of the house that is the real challenge.

Getting older sucks in so many ways, as even though I am not in "that bad" shape, I am definitely finding it very hard to stay constant. I struggle with my diet as I have my entire life, and this has been further compounded since the stroke, as both my patience and impulse control are not as strong as they were earlier. It is hard to explain, but perhaps it is kind of like always being a bit drunk, where the guard is down and the walls of control are much thinner.

Try as I might, I am yet to find anything good to come from the stroke.

I often wonder why if we are part of some intelligent design, how come we haven't evolved to have habits that are more conducive to our own wellbeing. After all this time, we should be far better, but instead, we seem to very much be randomly put together and suffer the same issues that we have for millennia, with very little "personal" development, even though technologically we have advanced a lot.

I sometimes try to do the impossible math on what it would look like if we put our complete resources into wellbeing measures and discovering the best way to be human instead of all the useless stuff we currently spend our availability on. Similarly, I try to imagine the speed of development for something like clean energy, if we diverted our efforts in that direction, rather than for things like weapons and war. As said, it is an impossible task, partly because there is no history of this actually happening before - we are always far too preoccupied with beating each other at something, than discovering our best together.

And perhaps that is what I need - someone to workout with, even if we don't actually workout together, but just get each other to go. I have tried to get my wife to be my gym buddy, but she just isn't interested enough to see that I need it. Not to mention, it would likely be good for her anyway.

Motivation is one of those things that we don't know how much affect it has on us, until we don't actually have it within us and the things that we know need to be done, aren't getting done. Bit by bit and perhaps very rapidly too, we start to degrade across the spectrum of everything that is important to us and in short order, there really isn't much left to look forward toward. It becomes a spiral that kills the drive even more and if allowed to fester, becomes a series of nails in the proverbial coffin.

It seems so easy to just "change" behavior, but the thing with behavioral change is that it takes time in order to set in, both in the positive and negative. But, if we aren't patient or motivated enough to commit for a long enough period of time, the negative takes hold, because the negative is largely a passive process where nothing need be done to degrade, whilst the improvement is an opt-in frame that requires effort and attention.

It is easier to do nothing, than something.

But, baby steps, right? Start somewhere, start walking, or chewing, or whatever visual works for you. For me, I probably shouldn't chew any more than I currently do, so walking toward a better life seems more fitting to my predicament.