Tag: resolutions

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Breaking Orbit

Pavowski10 Comments

This weird thing happens when you try something new. Exercising, or writing, or getting up earlier, or changing your diet.

First, the honeymoon. You make the decision and you feel fantastic about it: this is going to change me for the better! New year, new me! This time it’s for good! Maybe you go off the deep end: you hit Amazon and buy a bunch of new gadgets to make the change stick: new exercise equipment, a spangly doohickey for the kitchen, a fancy new word processor, new apps for your phone. And for the first few days, maybe even a week, it’s awesome. Difficult, but awesome. The change washes over you like a cool breeze in the dead of a Georgia summer.

But that’s fleeting. And the honeymoon passes quickly.

They days turn into weeks, and the body begins to resist the change, because the body is like electricity: it follows the path of least resistance. That least resistance means doing what you already know how to do, which is to say, not exercising, not writing, sleeping in late, eating the same old crap. Once the honeymoon is over, your body and mind pull a what is this shit?!?! and essentially revolt. Getting out of bed feels not only difficult, but demoralizing. Writing even a few words seems impossible. The sight of your workout clothes fills you with despair. If you even think about eating another salad, you might conduct your own personal holocaust in the produce section at the Kroger.

This is where most people fail. This is why New Year’s Resolutions collapse. It’s why people lose ten or fifteen pounds on their diets, then turn around and put twenty pounds back on. It’s why the internet is littered with the corpses of blogs that have maybe a dozen posts (I’m looking at you, accidentallyinspired.wordpress.com). It’s why you can always find workout equipment on craigslist and ebay for super-cheap. People make a change, but they can’t escape the gravity of the old way, and before you know it, their momentum peters out and they fall back to earth.

The funny thing, though? That point where gravity pulls you the hardest, where you feel you just can’t find the strength to stick to your plan? That’s the breaking point. When you can find the way to make it past that last stage, find the heart to stay with your plan for just a little bit longer, that’s when you can achieve escape velocity.

Space Shuttle, Liftoff, Atlantis, Rocket, Boosters

Because the thing about the momentum that’s keeping us to our old ways is: it cuts both ways. That moment we can embrace the positive momentum we’ve established and use it to catapult ourselves forward rather than allowing the negative momentum to pull us backwards is the moment where the change is no longer change; it’s a new normal.

Five years ago, I didn’t exercise, I was eating like crap, I hadn’t written anything in years. I went to work, I came home, I chilled with my wife, watched some TV, and that was life. These days, I feel antsy and horribly unproductive if I don’t write at least a little something every day. I get grouchy and irritable if I don’t go for a run. I get up at the crack of dawn basically every day (though I have my kids to thank for that). And … well, I still eat like crap. Nobody’s perfect, but we’ll keep trying anyway. But I still go to work. I still chill with my wife. I still watch some TV. But I get all of it done in the same twenty-four hours I’ve always had in every day. This is something I can’t really explain, and I’m not sure I want to look at it too closely. I fear that, like the mirage glimpsed out of the side of the eye, it’ll vanish if I try to focus on it.

I’m not an expert in psychology. I’m not a life-coach. But I know this: We are powerful. We can achieve great things, even if those things are only great in our tiny spheres of influence.

If only we have the heart to seize our potential and take control of our momentum.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

CommiTTmenT (You Don’t Need New Year’s Resolutions)

Pavowski18 Comments

A few days ago, I posted a roundabout look at New Year’s Resolutions and my general disdain for them. And freely I own that I’m a cynic and a Grinch about lots and lots of things. But I don’t think I’m wrong. Most New Year’s Resolutions fail, right? I mean, you apparently need look no further than any gym. Gyms sell enough memberships in January to keep them in the black for the entire year. Regular gym-goers spend January and February griping about the resolution-makers that clog up the gyms during those months. They go and buy their memberships filled with purpose and zeal. They arrive at the gym without a real plan and mill about, hopping on a treadmill here, a bench-press machine there, and then they go home, feeling good about themselves for getting out of the house. I’ve read ridiculous stories in the last couple of days about sign-up lists of over an hour to get on a treadmill. An HOUR! (Protip: run outside and feel less like a rat on a wheel!)

Of course, by the time March comes around and the realization has dawned that it’s hard making time to go to the gym regularly, and that it takes work and discomfort to make the change they want in their bodies, the herd thins out. Why? I think there are two factors at work.

First is societal pressure. At the New Year, everybody is making resolutions to change his or her life for the better. “New Year, New Me!” And they promise to lose weight, cut back on vices, start working out, save more money, be a better person, and on and on ad nauseam. Problem is, they’re making these resolutions because they’re supposed to. It’s that time of year, after all, and people are going to be asking what your New Year’s resolutions are, and you want to have something good on your ledger. Which is one of the worst reasons to make a decision about changing your life, not to mention, it doesn’t work.

The reason it doesn’t work is the second factor: commitment. Or rather, a lack of it. If you want to make a change in your life, it takes time, and thought, and hard work, and a hell of a lot of sticktoitiveness. You know, “commitment.” The average New Year’s Resolution is made in a haze of misery about the state of a life lived over the previous year. It’s a lament after looking at oneself in the (literal or metaphorical) mirror. It’s born of frustration and disbelief (how did I let things get this way?) because it is based in the moment. But in the self-centered, instantaneous-feedback world of iPads and Twitter and name-your-app-or-device-that-has-I-or-me-or-my in its title, it’s hard for us to think outside of the moment.

Unfortunately, change doesn’t happen in the moment. I look in the mirror and recognize that I didn’t go overnight from 175 pounds up to almost 200. It’s easy to think that the change was sudden, but no, the fact is I worked hard at making myself that way by not fighting against my own momentum for about a year. I’d have to be an idiot to think I could decide on Jan. 1 to lose weight and start turning it around right away. Except that’s exactly what happens. People buy their gym memberships, go dutifully for a few weeks, don’t see the type of radical change they’re looking for and/or expecting IMMEDIATELY, think “fargo it”, and go back to the couch. People decide they’re going to write, and they do so religiously for a few weeks, but then it dawns on them that it’s actually work to write and it takes away time from other things they’d rather do, and it’s over. If you look around, you can find scads of blogs with twenty or fewer posts. They create the blargs, full of that mystical swill that makes us want to share and tell stories and paint pictures with words, and then slowly the gumption peters out and the blargs fall discarded like so many chewed-up tires by the roadside. (I’m painfully aware of this, because the title I wanted for this blog is in use by a woman who created a blog to talk about her pregnancy and wrote all of 2 POSTS back in 2011. Fargo!)

No, change takes commitment. It takes a good, long, hard look at the self — and not just the self we see, but the self we are: the love handles and the laziness and the fact that we can’t climb a flight of stairs without breaking a sweat and the fact that it’s so much easier and more inviting to watch hours of Reality TV reruns than it is to pick up the pen (virtual or otherwise) and create something. It takes a plan of action, not just jumping into the deep end of the pool and hoping for the best. It takes patience and an acknowledgment that it takes time to change your momentum: every step you take toward a new self is a step twice as hard, because you’re fighting against the current of your own bad decisions. The good news is, each step unburdens you just a little bit as you drop the bad momentum and build good momentum. It’s slow going, is all, and it takes commitment to weather the storm.

The point is, you don’t need New Year’s to make a change in your life. Or maybe you do. Ultimately it doesn’t matter when you make the change, the important thing is that you make the change. But don’t make it because you have a glass of champagne in your hands and the balls are dropping.

What’s that? Oh. Ball. The ball (singular) is dropping. Don’t make a change because it’s the time for making changes. Make the change because it’s time for the change to be made, and commit to the work that the change requires.

Happy New Year.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Word Bloat, and a note on New Year’s Resolutions

Pavowski1 Comment

Perception is everything. Sometimes the only thing.

I was working on the edit last night, and I realized that I’m a lot closer to the end of the first pass than I thought I was. To be precise, there are still a lot of pages between my current position and the end, but the big rewriting is nearly done, and from there it’s just a pruning of the hedges, a dusting of the shelves, and a putting to bed of the toddlers. Then it’s finally going to be time to show this thing to some actual people to actually read it. Those people will then hopefully have mercy on my soul and tell me only in the kindest of terms how many root canals they would rather sit through before they’d turn to my book.

But the end is in sight. Maybe still a pinprick on the horizon, but at least the horizon is no longer an endless blue expanse — it actually looks as if I may be coming back into harbor after all this time. And that’s awesome. Unfortunately, while I was noticing that the end is in sight, I also noticed the word count in the bottom corner of the document. It may be early in the game to be overly concerned with the word count on the novel as a whole, but like a chipped tooth that you can’t stop running your tongue over, I can’t put the number out of my head. The first draft was finished at roughly 89000 words. Now the thing is just a few hundred short of 100k.

It’s bloating. Slowly expanding in the middle, like a middle-aged married guy. And I worry that with the changes I’m making, it will continue to swell like a corpse in a pond if I don’t take measures to trim it down. It’s part and parcel of this whole editorial process, I suppose, for me to find yet another thing to smother my soul in doubt over.

So now, 40 pages shy of the end of the book, I’ve suddenly become draconian in my examination of the language of the thing. I wield my highlight and delete functions like twin poison-coated samurai swords. Which means I’m going to have to re-read the entire novel again making the same ruthless cuts, lest the first half sound like it was written by a living dictionary while the second half was written by a dictionary with all the adjectives and adverbs cut out.

But enough about the edit. It’s New Year’s Eve, which means it’s time to pop the champagne, break out the sparklers, and fall asleep at 9:30, because that’s how we roll in my house. It’s also time for resolutions, which is a tradition as idiotic as any we have in our funny old culture.

The date of Jan. 1 only has significance because we say it does. In the scope of the universe with all its bits of flying dust and nigh-endlessly burning gas and invisible particles and unfathomable tracts of empty space, the significance of one tiny planet making one revolution around one tiny sun has all the import of an ant fart in a hurricane. But somehow, and for some reason, we’ve decided that it’s a good date for “reinventing ourselves” and making vows that have as much likelihood of being fulfilled as my hair has of sprouting into a saucy pompadour atop my dome.

Here’s a hint for resolutions in general: if you’re making them for any reason at all other than because you find it of crucial importance to your life, you might as well write the resolution on a square of toilet tissue, and then use the toilet tissue for its designed purpose. Resolving to lose weight at the new year because that’s what everybody does? Yeah, you might as well just eat a dozen donuts now and save yourself the strife. Quitting smoking on your birthday? Go ahead and stop off for some new lighters on your drive home. If a resolution is worth making, it’s worth starting on it right fargoing now. As in, I resolve right now to stop griping about resolutions and go work on my novel.

See you next year.