I feel a bit rebellious against my habits today. I think I’m quite tired, I’m maybe almost too used to them now, so they don’t feel quite as exciting and shiny. I’m a bit sore from my running too. I’m aware that I have maybe just an hour of work to do today. Also, thinking about it, I’ve had three days of having to rush around to get things done, and then rushing out of the house to meet people. I was really looking forward to a nice quiet solitary day of getting things done today, but now it’s come to it, it feels a bit sad and boring.
I think I’ve also hit a bit of a flat phase after the sort of beginner’s luck phase of introducing these new habits. I felt like I was making progress but suddenly it doesn’t feel that way any longer. I’ve definitely hit this point with both gardening and housework. With both of them, it suddenly feels like 20 minutes a day isn’t making any inroads into the dirt and weeds. With the housework I’ve decided to change things slightly and try to tackle some of the untidiness and clutter next as I hope that might make the cleaning easier. At the moment cobwebs seem to spring up overnight in every nook and cranny, so it feels like fighting a losing battle. In the garden, I’m realising that all my efforts to get on top of the weeds earlier in the year seem to have been wasted, as my garden is full of nettles, mare’s tail and grass.
While I know that I’m supposed to be focusing on my habits and falling in love with the process instead of thinking about my goals, the reality is I find that really hard, because it doesn’t feel exciting enough. It just, actually, feels rather dull. If this is my life then maybe it’s not good enough. Maybe I need to introduce different habits.
James Clear writes about the fact that sometimes, in order to be really successful, the main skill or quality you need is to be able to deal with the boredom, the repetitiveness, of for example training every day or eating right or cleaning or watering the garden. I wonder why some people find routine comforting and others find it boring.
But I’m definitely having one of those days where I really just want to sit and watch a YouTube video instead of continuing through my tasks. Also, not happy with this post.
Another thing that’s on my mind today is that I’ve just had three days where I was too busy to get all of my new habits done. This wasn’t a case of dropping the ball but simply that I was out of the house for many hours each day. I don’t think the answer is to push through and stay up later getting stuff done, although maybe I am just being a baby about things and a little bit of tough love is the answer here. I’m wondering whether I need to try to make a different plan for those days where I have less time, maybe still doing the tasks but for less time, so that I maintain the habits.
I’ve just read my Course in Miracles lesson after I think missing three days due to busyness, and it felt really hard to make myself do it again. I felt like I didn’t WANT to consider the spiritual side of things, I didn’t WANT to banish the ego. I just wanted to think about habits and goals and how to make things better, whereas the lesson for today was “The light has come”, meaning that things are already GREAT, full of love and peace and joy. The total opposite of what I’ve been journaling about this morning.
So I think I’m going to try moving my study of ACIM earlier in my day, even in front of my journaling actually. It will be a bit of a change around because I have to use the computer for it, but I can still garden first thing to get some morning sunlight beforehand, but I’ve honestly been struggling to know what to say in my journaling anyway, and I think studying ACIM first might prompt a more useful journaling period. It will definitely be interesting as well to see what effect ACIM has on my book writing, which so far has been a very practical exploration of introducing new habits in an attempt to improve my life.
I feel quite excited about this decision. I think it could be an improvement over what I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks. I’m also interested in the idea of getting a bit tougher with myself though. It started with surprising myself on Saturday, when I thought there was no way I could do an additional mile at threshold pace after finishing parkrun, but finding it easier than I expected. Then, having struggled to get a lot of my habits done over the last three days due to extra busyness, I’m interested in trying to get up earlier and push myself more to get things done REGARDLESS, instead of just letting myself off the hook, and finally I’m hoping to start getting up a bit earlier going forward as I’ve been waking up around 4am quite often but letting myself go back to sleep, and I’m interested to see if I can improve things by just getting up immediately as I think that extra couple of hours of dozing and then being interrupted by an alarm might end up being harmful and costing me better quality sleep earlier in the night.
So more of a miracle focus and some tough love! Bye for now!