My friend Mike posts Mirror Mantras on his bathroom mirror each Monday to help get him through the week [go say happy birthday to him by the way!].
I posted my first Mirror Mantra in my March 12 of 12 last Monday, but why let the goodness stop there considering my mom didn’t make me take the post-it off the mirror, instead just moved it over to the edge of the mirror.
Here’s this week’s:
change is inevitable, growth is intentional.
glenda cloud
[My friend Dia wrote a really fantastic blog post on positive focus earlier today, please go read it!]
I have spoken, tweeted, and e-mailed people with a slight frequency lately on the topic of “being intentional” in the last while. It’s becoming a theme that I am trying to implement in my own life — and screwing up at rather hard, to be totally honest. However, the fantastic thing about intentionality, is that it is ALL about choice. And though fantastic, this freedom can make intentionality a little hard to grasp, and even harder to implement. It is hard to ask yourself myself before each choice you I make: “which of these optionss will impact me most positively?”
So what is it to be intentional? Like I said above, making the choice that will affect you the most positively in the most ways.
It is like one of those “choose the best answer” multiple choice quizzes, except without the pre-concieved negativity of how much those questions suck. We are trying to be positive in our intentionality here, are we not?
The thing is, it is often easy to identify the correct, most intentionally decided upon choice, but it is not as easy to act upon these choices. Sometimes for me, it is easier to act upon the intentional choices with regard to perception than it is with the ones that involve action. The other thing I am realizing is that I likely need constant reminder to make choices that are intentional. It is not enough to wake up and decide to make intentional choices.
I keep blaming circumstance. I keep saying to myself “It was so much easier to do this last semester . . .”
Why? Because of the influencers surrounding me. Physical Activity: Promotion and Adherence was, among various other things, a term-long lesson in intentionality. It is a Good Thing to be reminded a couple of times a week of not necessarily exact things, but things like Jay constantly reminding us to own the behaviour and change it. That is a reminder that I need to give myself.
What choices was I making last term that made me more aware of these aspects? More interaction with people striving towards the same things. More intentional exercise — 45 minutes a day 4 or 5 days a week. More constant nutrition logging — not to make a big deal of it, but just to make me more conscious of what I was putting into my body. The journalling thing I mentioned in a previous post is an intentional choice I hope to carry beyond Lent, but is one that I started trying to make again last term to deal with the emotional side of things.
Honestly, just because the class ends doesn’t mean the behaviour should. Not a chance. This is, this needs to be, far beyond a phase.
Today was not a good day for intentional choice-making. From what I have eaten, to the fact that I didn’t exercise, to the negativity I have felt towards certain situations or people, I need to change this. And I know that change is good, and change is a choice. The thing is, it is cyclical. Exercise is the cornerstone — it encourages me to eat better, it helps me effectively deal with what I am feeling. Dealing with what I am feeling prepares me better to write out the remnants of the day before I go to bed. Because of the above I sleep better. I sleep better and I can exercise a bit harder and think a bit clearer. It is all a choice.
Start over at that moment. We all screw up. Screwing up doesn’t mean I have to wait until tomorrow for a re-do.
Own the behaviour . . . and change it.
Last week I had a really awesome track workout. Because of the awesomeness both Sam and I experienced, we decided to go back this morning before class. Now, to be perfectly honest, because I’m in the gym at least one class a week, my exercise train has not derailed as much as it could have potentially during midterm madness [three exams in less than 36 hours is not fun], so Movement Ed, I am grateful for you, as am I for having a job where i can play around in the gym . . . and get paid for it [noodle hockey anybody?].
So this morning, I told my Twitter friends to have an intentional day, and went to school two and a half hours before my class started, and got the exercise train back on the literal track. And despite my breathing not being fantastic (mornings sometimes a little rough), I was determined to make the most of it and try to go kick my own ass out there. Because “K-I-C-K-A-S-S, that’s the way we spell success.” (–Giant, Matthew Good).
Today’s workout? It was hard. I left it feeling more exhausted than energized, and basically forced myself around the track for 45 minutes. I was TRYING. I was trying to be like “Yeah! This is awesome!”. Except it wasn’t. My cousin Dean was there too, along with Sam and I, and the kid just effortlessly basically runs straight out for half an hour (It blows my mind that people can still breathe when they do that, and then I remember that only 10% of us have screwed up lungs. And 50%~ of that 10% of us with asthma do not exercise. In Canada, that amounts to 1.5 million people. And now I have gone and scared myself with statistics about exercise engagement and asthma and want to go change the world.
And you know why half of asthmatics probably don’t exercise? The conclusion I came to on the track today while slogging through 5K:
A thing I hate about asthma? I feel like I can never have a consistent workout because there are about 8000 variables at play.
First it’s dependent on how I feel when I wake up. If I’m a little tight, or feeling a little “off”, I’ll still work out. if it’s anything more than that, I’ll push it off till the middle of the day or evening, or defer it until the next day. How I feel when I wake up in the morning though is also dependent on about a million things: my environment, the weather, the season and my own body. Identifiable variables today perhaps contributing to the not breathing my best: it snowed late this morning, hormones and a basically empty inhaler of Atrovent. So ALL of these things contributed to both how I felt when I woke up, AND how I felt during my workout. During the workout? That’s dependent on how my warm-up goes, how I FEEL about how my warm-up went [if it sucked, I’m less apt to push myself harder], the air quality in the locker room or gym [ex. intense fragrance, how dry the gym air is, etc]. And of course, the stuff I put into my body. So, food, water, and medicine. See the above point about the dead Atrovent, maybe didn’t give the Ventolin enough time to kick in, note that I didn’t eat before my workout, and realize that I forgot my water bottle in my locker? Less than perfect lungs, little fuel stores and probably some dehydration at play. So consistency? Not going to happen. That changes day to day. Once again, I’m sure most of you with any chronic disease can identify with this.
As I am winding myself around the track at the beginning of a sprint [running is a big deal, people. I used to only be able to do a quarter of the track, now I can do a whole lap with a long walking break between], and I’m fighting my lungs, fighting my legs, fighting my brain. Focusing on the breathing, focusing on ignoring the legs, focusing on telling my brain that it is the thing that wants me to BE INTENTIONAL about my choices. And fighting to let the zen that should be running take over.
The realization comes at this point.
If you don’t push through the shit, you don’t grow.
I run. I don’t run fast, I only complete that one lap, but . . .
I pushed through the shit. Like a flower.
The past is important in telling our stories, to understand where we’re at and why we’re there.
But tonight, I am not celebrating what’s ending . . . i am celebrating what is coming. I don’t “do” new year’s resolutions, because a resolution is simply a goal–and goals need to be set and re-set frequently to make progress.
Today I closed off 2011 with my friend and former coworker, Sara, just one of many amazing people I experienced the joy of meeting in 2011. We ate too many crepes and had an amazing time, and were ironically wearing the same Hollister hoodie in different colours, pink t-shirts underneath and brown jackets! [I took mine off for the picture].
After making a final pharmacy trip for the year (gotta love breathing, yeah?), I came home to do a final workout to hit 800 kilometers for 2011. To give some perspective on how much I’ve grown in regard to exercise and fitness in 2011, my total on December 31st, 2010 was a tiny 100 kilometers [which was upped to a legitimate 106 as I found later on that I had forgotten to count an April race in there].
That. Is. Huge. The big change in 2011 came in September through the amazingness that was Physical Activity: Promotion and Adherence, definitely my favourite university class thus far, and really gaining the understanding that the SMALL things make a BIG difference! Though an unintentional success attributed to making small changes and regulating physical activity, since mid-September [at my highest ever weight which may have been some sort of weird fluke] I have lost a total of 17 pounds. I can’t say I felt “bad” before or anything, but comparatively, I feel totally awesome both physically and emotionally with the GOOD changes that have happened!
I’ve walked 213 km, stationary biked 143, and racked up hundreds of kilometers in commutes. I walked one race, went on a few short hikes, went on an adventure rock climbing this past week. I played hockey both in my skates and in my Sauconies and skated down rivers. I’ve played in concrete jungles and playgrounds. This has been the most active year of my life, and I plan to strip that title away from 2011 and give it to 2012.
This year, I have reached farther than I thought I could, pushed my lungs and my body in bigger ways. I started thinking about things differently, relationships changed and growing happened. I did things I couldn’t believe I would or could succeed at.
I got a new job at an amazing daycare. I worked one-on-one at camp for a week, which was one of the biggest challenges and biggest joys simultaneously. I have met so many amazing people in “real life” and online. One of my best guy friends for a time became my first boyfriend and even though it mutually didn’t work out, it definitely did not damage our friendship, which was the most important thing to us. I returned to Chicago. I watched one of the girls I do inclusion with grow so much in where she’s at, while simultaneously realizing the growth in myself through her. I have fallen more and more in love with the subject that is applied health. I have changed my perspectives on health advocacy, become more involved, and continued to learn how to OWN my asthma and encourage others to do the same. I have learned to better live with what I’ve been handed. I have learned more deeply that health and wellness is a choice. I have learned to see things differently, engage differently, and not just make goals, but meet goals and ENGAGE in these goals to use them as learning experiences.
I want to continue that next year. Continue moving forward, continue proving myself wrong, continuing to grow and learn and thrive, not simply survive.
There is more goodness coming. There is a year of hope, joy, change, growth, learning, and love ahead.
Bring it on 2012. GOOD THINGS!
change your thoughts and you change your world
–norman vincent peale
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, even before this quote came into my life.
We define our own variables, our own thoughts, our own worlds.
We have the power to choose how we think about things in our lives, whether those things are positive or negative. We have the chose to determine whether we are going to be broken down by these things, these circumstances, or if we are going to use them to build ourselves up, and perhaps in turn, use the change in ourselves to build the people around us up.
We can choose to reach farther and climb over the obstacles, or we can choose to freeze in a wave of self-doubt and be stopped by them. There is no limit to how long we could stay frozen, but any length of time is keeping us from truly experiencing what we were created to do, and wasting precious moments of which we will never have enough. How we see our world is nobody’s choice but our own, and because of this we are stronger than we give ourselves credit for. Every single decision we make and every goal we strive to reach, whether it seems small or seems big, affects us in a huge way.
the ripple effect is too good not to mention / if you’re not affected, you’re not paying attention / it’s too good not to have an effect
–rogues, incubus
We have the choice to change our thoughts to change our worlds.
Don’t compromise. Go get it.