July Bootcamp 2012: Making an Olympic effort in the area I need to improve the most

While I didn’t make all the progress I’d hoped, I may have made the progress I needed. I improved my attitude and outlook tremendously over the last month, and where I was coming from, that was a great effort. I didn’t reach any summits. I may still be lacing up my boots for all I know. But I have reached a point (a starting point?) where I know things have to be different, I believe they will be different, and that I am the one who has to make them different.

“If you want things in your life to change, you have to change things in your life”. It’s hokey and simplistic and sounds like something you get at a self-help seminar, but it is a phrase that has resonated and stuck with me. I’ve got a lot of stuff in the quadrent of “people and things that don’t help me”. I don’t feel like I have enough stuff in the quadrent of “people and stuff that helps me”. I’ve pined after people who are not there for me for long enough. I’ve been a servant to the needs and desires and concerns of others for long enough. I’ve held my light under a bushel for too long. There are things that need to change. I started with me and the way I have been looking at things and (even more importantly) the way I have been feeling about things. Now some changes need to take a material form.

“Act… or be acted upon”. As I said before, I surrendered my actions and momentum and allowed focus to shift from what I needed and wanted to what has become a reactive, wait-and-see stance. Those kinds of stances are inherently unstable and I always get knocked over when I do that. Better to take action and damn the consequences than take no action and be damned by the consequences put on me by others.

“If you are not happy where you are… go where you are happy”. My own long-standing motto that I tell other people needs to be brought out of the box and dusted off for my own use. It’s not just a physical place either, or a job. If I’m unhappy in my mind, go to a happier place. If I am unhappy with my relationships, don’t fight it or force it; find relationships that make me happy. If my body is out of shape and stiff and spongy, work on it and move to a happier feeling about my health. If I don’t like the town I’m in, move. If I don’t like my job, move. The ongoing Olympic effort is to be happy – all the time. It has really kind of come down to being that simple. Be happy all the time. When I’m not happy, go to where I am happy. Even if I don’t know exactly where that is, start moving until things feel better. A friend once told me that she was once so depressed she spent days contemplating suicide, just to escape life and escape her emotional pain. Then she became very angry at all the people who’d made her feel that way (as she rationalized it at the time) and decided not to kill herself but to be a royal queen bitch to everyone and make them all suffer. And she was a truely unpleasant person for a while. But even being angry and hateful made her happier than being depressed and suicidal so I guess if you only feel a little bit better it counts as progress. (She’s much better now, and much kinder and happier, although still a deeply wounded person)

“I wanna see how lucky lucky can be”. The facts are: I’m a damned fortunate person, I have everything to be grateful for and very little to complain about and what there is to complain about is totally within my power and will to change. I used to have a t-shirt (a promo from the movie “Kuffs”, bonus points if you ever saw that!) that said: “Who needs experience when you have attitude?” Another phrase I’ve heard is: “Facts are totally relative to your attitude”.

• Damn, I’m just not good enough for anything, nobody wants to hire me. I suck.
• Somehow, this wasn’t the job for me. There must be something even better coming my way, so keep an eye out. Look harder and find a job that will really make you happy and fulfilled.

• Just my luck. I needed that money, now there are things I won’t be able to get or have.
• How lucky this happened when I have the money. Now I can drive around confident that I won’t get stranded someplace scary. This is just an example of how all my needs are being met at the right time because I live in a prosperous mindset.

• Nobody loves me, shit… nobody even likes me. I am crap and don’t deserve the company of other human beings.
• Life is change, life is movement. I’m glad they are on a different path and I hope they find it fulfilling. What I need now are new people in my life that are going to help me on my own course to happiness. I’m ever grateful for everything those friendships were, but I am not dependent upon them to define myself.

The facts of almost everything are subjective to the attitude we have when we look at them. So, if my attitude is right and in alignment with my greater good, the facts can’t be anything other than positive and fulfilling. I don’t have to be lucky in fact, I have to be lucky in attitude. Then all kinds of lucky events will unfold.

“Free your mind, and the rest will follow”. Thoughts become things, not the other way around. It might seem something of a waste of time, but I believe I need to spend more time with my thoughts, and let them lead my actions. Of course I have to act, even the Bible says “faith without works is dead”. It also says: “As a person thinks, so they are.” Somewhere my brain is telling me who and what I am. If it is doing this unconsciously, then I have no choice but to act unconsciously, and that is no good. Better to spend 90% of my time and effort thinking about what I want and how it will make me happy and 10% of my time taking action to make it happen. When I know where I want to go, the difference will be like a rubber life raft drifting with the tides and winds, meant only to keep it’s occupants alive vs a nuclear-powered submarine going anywhere it wishes, heedless of conditions.

Hugely long-winded and wordy, but I needed to get that all out for my own sake. I started off thinking this would not be a very productive bootcamp. But I decided to change my thinking and voila!, it may well have been the most beneficial one so far.

In the mythology of Herucles the demi-god was charged with a series of seemingly impossible tasks, all designed to bring failure. Because he was Herucles, he succeeded by luck and strength and a little thought. Maybe the lesson is that there is a solution for every challenge.

I once had a friend and a lover who introduced me to the phrase: “Hell is other people”. For her it was a frustration that the things she wanted and the way she wanted to live her life were constantly constraind by the “values” and traditions and margins established by other people in her life. Her parents, her husband, her friends and acquaintances. They all wanted her in some sort of mold that made it comfortable for them to relate to her. For her it was stifling and frustrating and exhausting. She often had to live her life in secret or code, and just as often restrain or give up the things she desired and wanted. Right or wrong is not the point. For her, trying to please others and meet their expectations was torturous.

The most impossible task for me is to find (or make) time for myself. And I mean just me. No phone, no text, no email, no drop-ins, no bump-intos, no wife, no friends, no family, no pets, no tasks, no orders, no lawn, no anything. Almost without exception, from the moment I get up until the moment I fall back into bed I am doing something for someone else, or not doing something because of someone else. I am meant to lead and instruct and teach and listen and reply and provide and explain and converse and fix and fuck and feed and clean and fetch and drive and drop off and visit and call and a bunch more things, all for other people. I cannot arrive at work without security asking me “How’z it gonna be today?!” I can’t go 10 minutes without someone calling my name. I can’t drive home without playing Mexican Taxi (I’m not complaining, it is a service I am glad to offer, but it is on the list of things I do for others) or being assailed by phone. I can’t take two steps inside the door of my house without my wife, who has missed me terribly all day, wanting to engage and converse and interact and couple. She has learned a little bit to give me some space for decompressing when I first get home, but she’s still there, creeping around the outside edges. Do laundry, clean something, cut something, rake something, argue about something, call family, see friends, pay bills, make dinner, make love, shower, shave, sleep, repeat. It’s like Groundhog Day without the laughs.

On that map of daily routine there are very few exits for myself and time alone. And alone means alone, with no one in range to interrupt or invade. Sleep is not an escape if you share your bed, really. There are the occasional, rare, quiet moments, but they are like fleeting breezes in the stifling heat. Mostly crowded in by other people. I don’t even know what I would do if I had time alone. Probably see if someone else wanted to do something.

I need to improve in the area of carving out time for just me. Unaccountable, unexplained, unrestrained time. Time for me to enjoy as I see fit. Time without, time away, time alone. I need some room to draw a full breath before I suffocate completely.

I’d like to make it a progressive and regular thing. 10 minutes to start. 10 minutes a week where I am exclusively and unassailably alone. Gradually increase that. Get myself an hour a week, maybe two. Get two hours in a row, or even an afternoon or evening. Go someplace no one can find me or run into me by accident. Get a day; one day from sun-up to sun-down where no one requires anything of me and if they did, too bad, I’m unavailable. Maybe drive for hours or wander in the woods or kayak a river or read or sleep or soak in the tub. Eat as little or as much of what I wanted, when I wanted. Contemplate, reflect, consider, realize. If I could get one day, one 18-24 hour day like that once a month or so… Maybe I could find a little bit of the me I’ve lost by spreading myself so thin.

Aiming for 10 sacred, private, precious minutes this week.

I would fairly say that most times I look at myself and it is hard to see how far I’ve come. I’ve made some big improvements over the last year in my life, my marriage, my career, my financials. But what I see mostly are the gaps in completeness and the unfinished road ahead.

No secret I need to make an Olympic effort on my attitude. I have been working to transmute my feelings of weariness and hopelessness and futility into feelings of energy, positivity, prosperity, and productivity. It is hard because there are still barbs sunk deep in my spirit and they won’t pull loose. I try to take just 2 minutes at the start of every work day, sitting in my car before I go into to work, to generate positive affirmations, to encourage myself and shore up my sense of purpose. Often my thoughts are overrun by anticipations of all the unhappy things that are about to occur over the next 12 hours. No doubt this is to some degree self-fulfilling, but also, it is just the way things are; like jumping in a pool and expecting to not get wet. This is not the place for me, and it is not shaping up to ever be the place for me. Every day I withdraw and disconnect a little more. Good for me. But I see that I’m not working to fill the gap or move to the next stage. Shame on me.

My current list of physical challenges for the year are over. No more races are on the calendar. I really need to go back to basics anyway and recover a lot of the ground I lost (and weight I gained) in the past several months. Putting my health and fitness last on the list of things to do in a day is paying poor dividends in energy and productivity. Olympic effort to make time and effort for healthy eating and exercise. I calculated how much we have spent eating out since the first of the year and it is an ungodly sum. I usually come home too tired and irritable to cook, which sucks because cooking is my job and I should be as good at it at home as I am at work. That has to change. We need to eat better and less expensively. I need to be responsible for this.

My brain stays in a whirl, consumed all the times with details, details. Need an Olympic effort towards calming my brain, relaxing and meditating. Directed, but relaxed, thinking to ease the tension I feel all the time.

A friend of mine gave me a series of audio CD’s to listen to. Something like 22 hours-worth of affirmation building and positive thinking techniques and goal achieving. She said I should listen to them every day for three hours a day and try and finish them in a week. Haha. My best prediction is I will finish them in three weeks, but I hope they will be helpful. One of the quotes from the series which she said was a real eye-opener and really turned things around for her was: “If you want things in your life to change, you have to change things in your life”... I know, I know. I rolled my eyes too and thought that if this was the meatiest part of this series, it was going to be a very long 22 hours. But she is quite high on the series so I’m going to give it a try. If nothing else, listening to positive thinking affirmations can’t do me any harm while driving, right?

This is a big rock I am pushing, and since it is all uphill I will never get any momentum going, it is always going to be efforts punctuated by pauses to recover. Whatever changes I make need to start with me and need to start again at a fundamental level. I feel like in many areas I have to go back to the starting place and re-cover the same ground. I don’t like doing this but I like what I see when I look at myself and where I am right now even less. I’d rather retrace my steps than continue on this way.

There are no coincedences.

Of late I have been very low. Many reasons. But I am coming to see them not as reasons, but excuses. This isn’t the way I want to feel and live and act and spend my days. My brain has bought too far into the notion that what happens externally has an inevitable effect upon my status internally. That just isn’t true. I choose my feeling, my responses, my actions. Even when I don’t choose, and let myself be reactive or inert… that is a choice.

I know this… I know this… I know this…

So, why this capitulation to external influences? Why this self-imposed exile to the Bleak? I’ve always maintained that if you’re not happy where are, go where you’re happy. If you don’t want to be poisoned, stay away from toxic things (and people). If you can’t find what you want in life, try looking in new places. No one can take your personal power, only you can let it leak away.

I know… I know… I know…

Months ago I chose the various avatars I planned to use here during the year. Quite by chance I selected the current image, which is a marble bust of Hercules, to be my July avatar. Now I’m part of a goal to make an “Olympic effort” in the area I need to improve the most. The area I need to improve the most is me, at the ground level.

SometimesMOST times, the daily me gets lost in the shuffle of future plans and stratagies, also in the eveloping concern for the plights of others. Often I act without wisdom or consideration of consequences in the believe that everything will work out in the end. I may as well take my personal power and flush it down the toilet. Often I get so focused on the results I desire, when they don’t come I feel I’ve invested too much to let go or pursue another direction. This leaves me ever the guy on his hands and knees scouring the same two square feet of ground for a dropped contact lens that “just has to be here, it just has to, it couldn’t have gone anywhere else…” I’m more apt to worry that other people will consider me a failure if I walk away from something that isn’t working.

Like sludge at the bottom of a sink, all this builds up and blocks the drain. No clean water, just a murky, greasy, smelly mess. No flow of energy, just stagnation.

My Olympic effort, and it will be a Herculean one as well, is to unstop the drain and wash the toxic sludge out. I mean this physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I don’t need to change Me, I need to change how Me is handling things. I need to change Me’s perception of things and his priorities. I need to listen to Me. He’s been saying for some time that things are not right and I haven’t been paying attention like I should. There are enough things right now that aren’t working that it justifies a ground level workover and a realignment. A rebirth, in fact. This was one of the things I decided during my July 4th run. This won’t be an easy month, I predict. But I am going to make an Olympus-wothy effort.