Discipline and Habit Building

“Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits.

Watch your habits; they become your character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”

 - Buddha

My weekend was used to give my final respects to my grandmother. On Saturday, I was given the honour of placing her ashes in her grave, alongside the plot of my deceased grandfather. Not the way one wants to reunite with one’s family, but it was good to see everyone again. I toured around territory that I haven’t seen in ages, through some parts I’ve not been to since I was in my mid-twenties.

Sunday was very energy draining, but in good ways for the most part. I ran my best time for ten kilometres; breaking my old record from last September by a full minute. I wish I had a better gap of time between traveling back home and starting work in the afternoon.

I’m supposed to use this day to rest from marathon training, and it’s hard not to be seduced into running on a day like this: by the finest weather I’ve seen since this year began. It was so beautiful outside during the day, and so perfect to do so, but using discipline not to run and to rest and allow one’s legs and body to mend and build muscle tissue is just as important as using discipline to drive oneself ahead. I only risk injury while I have the remaining stiffness after yesterday’s feat. So this morning, I directed my energy instead to cleaning house, ledgering expenses, and doing so some mechanical tinkering with my bike and car before I went to work this afternoon. The bonus about this day was that at long last I got to move my “office” outside on my set-up deck space: working out there with my laptop. Sunshine and fresh oxygen seems to make caffeine work optimally, and so my brain felt like it ticked along harder. I stayed out there until sun’s glare reflecting off the screen got too intense.

My excursion this afternoon involved providing assistance for someone in making contact with a certain volunteer agency for a function in the near future. The formality was such that I had to fill out an application as well. It was the “skills and interests” field that really started my mind spinning. Perhaps it was some afterthoughts from Saturday’s service that made me wonder what I’m really doing with my life. It saddened me to think that there are so many things that I used to do, but now I feel so estranged from them all, and it’s like they’ve rusted away from disuse due to me being so engaged with my current job. Some of the tech stuff I knew has been obsolete for a long time. I’m dissatisfied with this feeling of being left in the dust, and found some kind of renewed eagerness to re-apply the practical knowledge I still have, and to learn more new and modern skill applications. I dived into websites, and my collection of e-books and PDF files for such stuff once I arrived back home. I arrived at nothing conclusive. All the course of living is just a complicated series of habits. Some progressive; others counterproductive. The trick for change is to simplify things and to maintain focus. Lack of focus, direction and motivation are the real culprits for me in not adopting something better as a good habit. The only thing that I got curious about and found to experiment with was a site called Habit Forge. I just have to create the list of habits that I want to build to be prompted into changing through reminders sent to me by e-mail. I wonder how useful this would be since one of my bad habits is not checking my e-mail on a regular basis. It better be damned interesting to make me want to bother sticking with the process. The real trick is to find things in my life that could be changed in 21 days.

I end my day indulging in whipped cream on chopped frozen bananas, chatting with a friend on Skype, and listening to some trance music. I was trying to build some new playlists for running, but all this was doing for me was making me imagine blissful thoughts of all the women I’d like to see dancing to this stuff. At least that’s something motivating to keep me in the habit of fitness.