Looking Out My Back Window #201

Originally posted on Facebook HERE

Do you ever get frustrated with yourself? I think no matter what you do or how much you accomplish in life there always seems to be a part of us that thinks we could do or be more than that. I’ve been feeling it a lot lately, probably because my time is spread so thin. Makes it hard to get to everything I want to do. Right now, I’m not happy that I’ve fallen so far off the physical fitness plan I was on for a while there… which was yoga, meditation and running 2 miles+ every day. I did that for 294 days in a row. Then decided to just let it go when we went on vacation – because what had happened was that that rigidity about doing those three things every single day – while I was probably in the best shape I had been in for a long long time – those daily rituals had started to become a chore. The fun was being sucked out of them by the repetition. So, once I got back I put a new plan together… for the next year or so… and… haven’t really followed it. Ugh. So now I feel fat and lazy. Totally frustrated with myself. What kept me going during the streak in many ways was the streak – once I had a string of days in, well… I didn’t want to break it. Especially when it was 25, 50, 100, 200 days… the streak itself becomes part of the motivation. And, once broken – to start at day one again feels daunting. But physical fitness isn’t my entire life – I have a job (busier than we’ve ever been there), an album we’re working on with my band The Fusion Project, a wife, a dog, a yard, a family… all kinds of things that need and deserve attention above and beyond just working out. So when I commit to working out daily, that time has to come from one or several of the other things, which means… you guessed it – I’ll be frustrated because I’m not doing enough in those areas then. And I’m wired in a way that I want to be all things at all times in every area always. Which I’m finding out is most likely an impossible task. So, the wave of activities needs to swing back to fitness again because I’ve enjoyed a few lazy months now and my frustration with that has boiled over into the action phase. You know the action phase, right? Where you let something go for so long it finally moves to the front of the focus line. When that happens, everything else moves back a step. Until the next frustration hits of course. Frustration gives us the motivation to move forward and make positive changes in our lives. If I really look back on what I’ve achieved in my lifetime, a lot of it was because in some way I was frustrated with something and that gave me to the motivation I needed to write a book, start a band, change jobs, or work out regularly, among other things. Change your frustrations to motivations and it becomes a positive force in your life.