Often times when I sit down to write one of these posts these days, I wonder how the hell I was ever able to write one every single week. Then I remembered I started this blog 3 months before graduating, moved across the country, Max’s brain expanded a bit, and I moved once again back across the country.
That’s a bit more content than a Sisyphusean 9-5 lifestyle can provide, so I feel less bad now.
Something I’m curious about, and if you don’t mind commenting here or on the Instagram post with genuine thoughts, I would appreciate it: for the few people actually reading these posts, why? I’ve always been curious, and it’d help me a bit with figuring out what to write if I knew why people were still reading these.
Anyways, I feel like I am continuing to build a foundation. Meal prepping on Sundays is one of the best habits I have ever picked up, I cannot recommend it enough. Every Sunday I wake up, and pick a recipe I feel like eating for the week, generally chicken, a carb, and a vegetable. I make my grocery list based off of the listed ingredients, and come home and make the recipe, usually doubled or tripled based on how many the recipe is supposed to feed. This entire process, today for example, took 3.5 hours, and I now have dinners and breakfasts for the entire week.
I’ve gotten pretty good at cooking this way too; at this point I’d say I’m eating the best and healthiest I have in my entire life, and am doing so without breaking the bank at all. This has enabled me to make use of my time throughout the week, which is a game changer since it’s already so limited between work and the gym every day.
With all of these lifestyle pieces falling into place, I’d love to be able to say that I’m thriving, and to some degree, in a more objective sense, I am. Subjectively though, that’s definitely not the word I’d use.
Doing well? Yes, absolutely. I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been, I look the best I ever have, I’m close to being able to save 20% of my income, I have a solid future plan in place, and I’m able to enjoy my weekends in the presence of close friends.
The thing is, it’s exhausting. Very simply, it is not easy to make sure that every second of your life is spent well (and admittedly, I’m still not 100% there). I’m sleeping 8 hours a night which is wonderful, but I’m just always on. Even the time I spend relaxing tends to be doing something with intention, and having grown up in a world where fewer and fewer things are done with actual thought given to the matter, this is more difficult than I wish it were.
That said, every second of it is worth it. It feels like living out the parable of the house built on rocks vs the house built on sand. Having lived without much in terms of a set routine for so long, it was difficult whenever things got difficult to have nothing to fall back on that I felt I could get to picking up the pieces; this made bad times worse, and last longer.
Now, I feel like I have spent the past few months, and will continue spending many more months, building nothing but a foundation. No house, no furnishings, just boring, mundane foundation.
I’ve been listening to David Goggins lately, and while he is entirely insane, there are takeaways that I think are worthwhile to hear.
One of the primary things I took away from listening to his most recent book, Never Finished, is that motivation is a weak driver. Motivation is what gets you in the door, but it rarely keeps you going for any significant amount of time. I have tried going to the gym probably five or six other times in my life, but never to anywhere near this extent, nor for this extended a period of time. I especially didn’t want to bother dieting to boot, which is of course required to actually cement the results in.
The difference maker is discipline. I’ve never in my entire life had even a modicum of discipline. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in some ways; my brain works in a specific way that I think is advantageous to me much of the time, and helps me to adapt and work off my back foot with ease. It also means that discipline does not come remotely naturally to me. It has taken a herculean feat of will to get myself where I am now, and even still there is space to grow.
And the thing is, it only gets *slightly* easier with time, or at least that is what I have found thus far. Cementing in a routine makes your unconscious behaviors better, but it does not necessarily mean that it is always easy. It helps in the sense that now, I don’t even know what I would do with the time if I did decide to skip the gym on a given day. Still, most days it’s a conscious choice to get up and go, and some days it’s one I’d much rather not make.
Would I trade that in, though? Not at all, which is also what has kept me going. The choices I have been making are the best ones I have made for myself in a long time. My mental and physical wellbeing are both in high priority, and that has (unsurprisingly) been to my benefit. I’m working on myself, and doing it right, and I’ve come to rely on myself to do things that are self-constructive instead of self-destructive. This is new to me, and it’s worth every second of being slightly fatigued all the time.
P.S. I have said this 100 times before, but I do really want to start working on some posts that aren’t just reflections. I’m getting bored of not doing any writing projects, and I’m going to find some things to do with that moving forward, I think.
Song of the Week:
The Line 
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