Deliverable

Note to self: Sometimes even tiny small steps feel good. They definitely feel better than the alternative.

It’s important for me to remind myself that things are getting better. Deliverable and all this life hackery are making a difference.

• I sleep in my bed now instead of falling asleep in front of the television.
• I’ve given up the indiscriminate watching of television.
• I eat fiber breakfast cereal every day.
• I take a multi-vitamin every day.
• I make sure that all of my dishes are washed before bed every night.
• I do some type of exercise daily. It might not always be perfect, but I have been consistently exercising every day in some way.
• I’ve cut out my intake of sugary snacks, especially soda.
• I practice at least one instrument every day.
• My trombone playing has improved due to the regular practice.
• I’ve honored the promise I made to myself to work on my projects for a minimum of 50 minutes a day. (“Projects” has basically meant “The Book.) I’m on track to deliver version 1 on time.
• My apartment is a hell of a lot less cluttered than it used to be, and all in all a lot nicer to live in.

One of the things I struggle with is the speed of my progress. Many days it can be difficult to “see the forest for the trees”.

Things are better. The struggle is worth it.

Rinse and repeat above statement 100 times daily until I believe it.

It’s not perfect, but it’s progress. That’s what I need to keep reminding myself.

I’ve completed the first 7 days of my 30 Day Exercise Challenge. I must say that so far it’s been a very positive experience. I can really see myself completing this challenge. I find that I look forward to my exercise each day, and am trying to find more and more variety in my exercise choices.

I’ve also revamped slightly the layout of how I’ve been tracking my progess. I flipped the Monday-Sunday format I was using so that it’s now laid out like this:

Su:
Sa:
F:
Th:
W:
T:
M:

This way I can more easily see the progression of what exercises I’ve done over the past week. I also set up a Fitness Tracking Archives page to make it a bit easier to edit the main tracking page each week.

Having the large variety of exercises to choose from assures that you’re not going to overstress or injure a specific body part by overtraining. The other thing that helps is knowing that it’s so easy to be successful. If my schedule only allows me to walk one of my walking routes, then I’ve successfully exercised that day. If it happens to be raining that day I have alot of other indoor options to choose from. The key is choices, choices, choices and structuring those choices in such a way that “exercising” can mean spending 4 minutes doing crunches on the ball.

I think the thing that most people miss about exercise is that the effects are cumulative. A little bit of exercise every day goes much further than alot of exercise engaged in sporadically. Exercising every day is more of a philosophical life choice. We often hear ourselves saying “I don’t have the time to exercise”, but that’s just not true. More specifically what we’re saying is “I don’t have 2 hours to spend going to the gym”, which might be absolutely true. By making their definition of exercise so rigid most people rob themselves of an opportunity to be healthy and fit. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making gym membership a part of your life if it’s something that you can afford and have the time to do. But it’s much more difficult to fit that two hours into your life consistently if that’s your only exercise option.

Adults have houses. Adults have children. Adults have car payments and lawns to cut. They have clothes to buy for the kids and gas to put in the car.

Does having kids and houses and cars make you an adult? No, but kids and houses and car payments quickly separate the adults from the non-adults. You can usually tell which parents aren’t adults by the way their kids act. If the kids are unruly and rude and obnoxious, I’d say the chances are much higher that the parents aren’t much more than adolescents themselves. If the front lawn is up to the windows and the inside looks like crap, the chances are much higher that the folks inside aren’t adults. They’ve never acquired adult habits.

My parents I’d consider to be adults. My father worked an honest job for 40+ years to put food on the table and pay the mortgage and put clothes on my back. My mom worked as well to pay for the things we needed and to raise our standard of living. The grass got cut. The inside of the house stayed tidy.

My parents have adult habits and in many ways I do not.

I spent 5 years of college building those non-adult habits. It’s the essence of college. Freedom for the first time! No need to go to bed at a specific hour. No one telling you what to do! Complete freedom! I continued and refined those habits in 2 years of graduate school. Many of them I continue to this day.

My parents never had the luxury of having the same habits that I’ve developed. (See above, re: 40+ years on the job, etc.) When you have to pay the mortgage and put food on the table “not working and letting days slip by” isn’t an option. I’m not saying that they’re perfect. I’m not saying that I’d want the type of life that they’ve made for themselves, and I’m also not suggesting that by not wanting that type of life that I think it’s less than admirable in any way.

The only thing that I’m saying is that my parents have adult habits and that in many ways I still don’t want to see myself as an adult. (To this day I have a phobia of dealing with the parents of my students because in some way I see them as adults that could rebuke me, rather than as equals.)

I need the type of habits that helped my father work a job 40+ years. It’s not that I want a “job”. What I want is to take the time he spent working at his “job”, instead investing in my own projects and my own creativity. I want to apply the type of adult habits that my parents have used to create a reasonably stable life for themselves in retirement towards creating the life of my dreams.

As though there were any doubt about. My day has been pretty useless, and I’ve not been able to focus on anything much so far. The morning was spent catching up on the sleep I didn’t get this week because I went to bed later on the days that I taught than I should have.

It’s a chicken/egg thing. Does erratic sleep lead to feeling overwhelmed which results in me losing days at at time, or is that I feel overwhelmed and I compensate by staying up too late?

My lack of sleep this week wasn’t because I fell asleep on the couch. It’s just that I didn’t go to bed at the right time and only got a few hours of sleep on the nights before I taught. By the time I got home from teaching (on Wednesday) and teaching then class (on Thursday) I was zonked. So really, it’s been five days that weren’t used effectively.

I know this can’t continue, but I’m not sure how to break the habit.

I have rather large ambitions. I think that when I combine my ambitions with my tendency to jump around in my thinking it has the potential to derail me. I don’t want to be small, so I end up doing nothing at all. I become faced with the enormity of the task, and I melt down. My brain locks and I become paralyzed. I’m unable to see the whole of my ambitions as the necessary small chunks required to make it all a reality. Or perhaps a better way to put it would be to say that I get glimpses from time to time and I make small steps forward, but overall I’m unable to build the necessary momentum to hit a tipping point.

• I want to be a good guitar player.
• I want to be a good bass player.
• I want to be a good singer.
• I want to be a well respected trombone player.
• I want to have a record of achievement as a trombone player that is more than just “plays club-dates”.
• I want to be a well respected actor.
• I want to direct and make movies.
• I want to be a singer/songwriter.
• I want to have my own rock band that I lead and front.
• I want earn enough money to create a foundation that will help solve some of the problems we’ve created for ourselves in this world.
• I want to write a Broadway show.
• I want to be on Broadway as an actor & a singer.
• I want to work with great actors and directors.
• I want to publish a groundbreaking teaching method that changes the way people learn music.
• I want to create enough assets so that I never have to worry about money again.
• I want to move out of this shitty apartment.
• I want to travel the world and have really cool experiences.
• I want to build a place for myself that is an oasis… my retreat from the stresses of the world.
• I want to help in the fight to stop the current administration from raping the constitution.
• I want stop the religious right from taking my rights away from me.
• I see wrongs in my life every day and I want to make them right. I see lying politicians feeding at the public trough and it sickens me. I want to put and end to this.
• I want to help in the fight to keep monster corporations from owning everything and running everything
• I want to have the financial resources to take care of my parents when/if that becomes necessary.
• I want to use all of my talents and all of my creativity to create a life that has meaning, and passion, and joy, and pleasure, and all of the wonderful stuff that life has to offer.
• I want to make full use of myself.

All of this stuff is rattling around in my head, and that’s alot of stuff. Maybe it’s the perfectionist in me, but I’m not willing to let any of it go. I’m unwilling to be mediocre. I’m unwilling to settle for less than I can be. The problem is that I can’t see the A./B./C./etc. progression that is necessary to get all of this stuff done. Or maybe I sorta see it (I know the damn book must be finished if I’m ever to move forward) but I’m afraid to just finish the first step because I’m afraid that the first step will be the only step.

I’m willing to accept that there are things on my list above that perhaps are there because I think I “should” do them, or that I “could” do them. I know that I have a tendency to hero worship a bit. I know that I respect Robert Rodriquez and that I love his approach to filmmaking, for example. I know that I have made short films in the past and have been successful at it. I added “direct and make films” to my list above. Maybe this is just a wish right now and will never move past that, but at least it’s something to latch on to.

Right now I feel like alot of the things on this list are “if only’s”. “If only I could get my shit together and consistently do -insert item here-, I’d be a hell of alot better at it”. Maybe that’s part of the problem. The question that I must focus my energy on is this:

I believe that the universe is infinite, and that within each of us is infinite potential and depths unimagined. If we begin with the premise that all things are possible, then only question we need concern ourselves with is “Which thing will I do first?”. This allows us the freedom to begin (and complete) things without fearing that we’re making the wrong decision.

This is where I am now with this stuff. I have to say that it feels good to get all those ambitions out of my head and “out into the universe” in a concrete way. I know that right now there is only one person reading this blog, but still it’s helpful to put this stuff out there. It makes it more real and forces me to more honestly assess things. They’re no longer secret possible things in my head, but things that I could be called out on at a later date by someone reading this blog. That helps in an odd kind of way.

Having this out there forces me to say “Ok, if I am indeed serious about wanting to do these things, then what the hell is the next step? How the hell do I organize things so that these things become reality?”.

I know that I listed erratic sleep patterns as my original Public Enemy Number One. I know that dirty dishes were/are right up there as Public Enemy Number One-A. Both of these are definitely things that are holding me back, but I think they’re also symptoms of a larger issue.

What is my real “Public Enemy Number One”?

It comes in three forms and they’re all interrelated:

Becoming Overwhelmed. Difficulty Staying Focused. Finishing.

I have days (sometimes single, sometimes multiple) where I get completely overwhelmed by life. Days where every action that I could take becomes almost painful because it seems hopeless. On days like this I either curl into the fetal position, or I find some mind numbing activity to escape into. On days like this my ambitions seem to wither and die. Simple things that might have a positive impact on my life become incredibly difficult to do.

The problem is that I have these type of days pretty periodically so it’s hard to build momentum. It feels alot like one step forward and two steps back. Like I said, I know that all of this stuff is interrelated. It becomes a “chicken/egg” spiral type of thing. I’ll feel overwhelmed, so I’ll spend the night on the couch and not in my bed. My sleep suffers, so physically I’m more apt to feel overwhelmed the next day. “Rinse & Repeat” until I manage to snap myself out of it.

“Becoming Overwhelmed” is a pretty inexact description of what’s going on. It feels like falling off a cliff into darkness in some ways. Staying focused is more difficult than ever.

I think this is part of the problem that I have with finishing projects. Not all projects, mind you. I have still been able to function in the world. I’ve accomplished some things. But always with the nagging thought that if only I could get my shit together I could be and do so much more with my life.

So there’s the triumvirate: I get overwhelmed, I have trouble staying focused, and then I end up not finishing things.

What the hell to do about it? At this time I have absolutely no idea. Maybe it’s enough right now to admit that this is the big “Public Enemy” that’s been holding me back. I’m gonna go take my walk that I’d planned for today and get some dinner. I may post some more thoughts on this when I get back. I may not. Just have to see! : )

“Past Posts” that I really needed to get my day started today:

Fear
Field Trips
Quote of the Week: 1/29/06
The Book: Ask the Right Questions
Make Your Own Luck
Need / Must / Gotta
Nothing Stopping

It’s good to be able to go back and see where I’ve been.

Reminder to self for today: Take one small action conscious action, and then take another. Rinse and repeat.

I freakin’ hate to do dishes. There, I admit it. I find it painfully tedious and unbelievably boring. I let my dishes pile up in my sink until the thought of even looking at my kitchen counter disgusts me. It’s only the prospect of having visitors over that gets me to actually do the damn things, and even that doesn’t always work. The camels back has finally been broken though. I was on my way out to teach on Thursday morning… I’d left a carton of milk out on the counter the night before because it had gone bad, I couldn’t actually pour it down the sink because of all the dirty dishes there. Of course I knocked the carton over, sending it’s half solidified contents all over the kitchen floor.

Enough is freakin’ enough!

I don’t know how I’m going to do this yet, but I absolutely positively must make this one of my “Public Enemies to be Eliminated”. It’s wrecking the quality of my life and I can’t take it any more. I think what it may take is a few “absolute lines in the sand”.

Here goes:

• I will do the dishes while I cook. (This would mean that I’d actually have to cook something, but that’s a whole nother post.)
• The dishes that I’m not able to clean while I cook, I will absolutely positively clean immediately after eating. This means that I will have to leave time in whatever my schedule for the day is for both eating and doing the dishes.
• I can not leave the house with dirty dishes. If M. is over and we have lunch or dinner, then the dishes have to be done before I walk her to the train, or we otherwise leave the house.
• I put the clean dishes away immediately the next morning after they’ve dried (in the case of dinner) or before cooking/eating dinner (in the case of breakfast/lunch).

It’s possible that I might come up with things as I go along, but this should get my started at least. Dishes for me are a serious “hot spot”. For me, one dirty dish left in the sink quickly turns into a raging forest fire of disgust. My one consolation in this is that the discipline that I’ll develop by keeping my sink clear is going to help me get to the point in my life where I am successful enough to buy a damn dishwasher.

More public enemies:
Erratic Sleep Patterns

“Things I could hear myself saying one day “#1:

I ended up teaching beginning guitar because I needed the money. The things is that teaching the guitar forced me to become a real student of the instrument, which raised the level of my playing tremendously. I found myself practicing alot more because I didn’t want to look bad in front of my students.