I very nearly didn’t go on my walk today.
As it was getting near coffee time I started feeling really cold so I snuggled up under the duvet and fell asleep. By the time I woke up it was an hour past the time I would normally leave for my walk so I decided I wouldn’t bother.
Instead, I got myself settled on the sofa, ready to watch a bit of tele later, and started reading about a digital nomad. I was taken to far off lands and found myself wondering whether, if I didn’t have a family, I would take that opportunity and become a digital nomad too.
As I was imagining myself living in different places around the world, having all these ideas of what I could do and what fun it would be, I suddenly thought . . . “you can’t even get yourself off the bloody sofa, for a 7,000 step walk, what makes you think you’d travel again”. And that thought, surprisingly, resulted in my getting up and going for a walk after all. I took my phone and my earphones with me and recorded this post ready to type up later which seemed like a good deal!
Another thing I very nearly didn’t do was send out the post last Friday which was just a poem.
I had to get beyond the usual umming and ahhing – was it ok to send just a poem, should I write a little bit of commentary at the start, should I create a new category on my blog for poems? Back and forth. In the end I just decided to send it because I was already in the process of doing so.
Low and behold, very quickly after uploading it I received a comment from a reader who thanked me for posting it because it had shown her how far she’d moved on in her life, from the time when the poem was particularly meaningful for her but had been hard to read. (You can read that comment on the blog should you so desire).
So . . . how is this post a ‘book bit’? Well . . .
[tweetthis remove_twitter_handles=”true”]Natural motivation is preferable but it’s not a prerequisite for action.[/tweetthis]
If you don’t dump a whole load of thinking on top of not doing something you might find yourself doing it anyway despite your lack of motivation.
I didn’t beat myself up for not going for a walk, I wasn’t thinking I should go because if I don’t a whole load of undesirable things will happen in the future, or it will mean I’m useless, lacking in discipline, lazy etc. I just noticed that I hadn’t gone for a walk, it was incongruent with some of the stuff I was thinking at that time (about being a digital nomad) and low and behold I’m out on a walk.
The second thing is I’ve noticed how often we move on and change in our lives and don’t appreciate just how far we’ve come until we’re reminded, like my reader was, by reading a poem or by some other happening.
Often I find I’m in a situation and I respond in a completely different way and I realise that I’ve actually got over something or moved on beyond something or seen something differently, without any awareness of that.
[tweetthis]Even when it feels like nothing is changing it always is.[/tweetthis]
Sometimes the shifts are so tiny they aren’t really apparent and the changes become so much a part of you that you don’t even remember or relate to how you were before. In effect you have become a new you without noticing and the movement has become an integrated part of that new you.
23 of 366 book bits