Hurtling towards the meaning of life: 4 tips to make New Year’s Resolutions stick.
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Meaning of Life — the abridged version:
Step 1: Chip away the debris of ancestral, cultural, social and spiritual nescience to discover you — the masterpiece within the stone of earthly existence.
Step 2: Polish and refine. Note: Do not add; subtract. Simplify.
Many of us take time to reflect on our lot in the New Year; take stock of our lives, this incomplete prize, and decide which part of our masterpiece should win our devotion this year.
Statistically (hate those), most people try their luck at winning over the gatekeepers of wellness. They are a double act: increase health and decrease stress. Championing them is like winning a shady parlor game that favors the house: it is a corrupted seesaw, kinked in its machinery, forever favoring the side that people (literally) get sick and tired of being on.
It is not that we lack inspiration to change and embrace the heady existence of awesomeness with evangelic rapture. Ten minutes online will get us enough inspirational messages and images to fill Pinterest boards and desktop wallpapers a thousand times over.
We are acutely aware of the magnificence that awaits us once we are fit and nurtured. What gets in the way is traffic. Queues. Deadlines. Wine sales. Dinner parties. New moons. Cravings. Tiredness. Life.
Those who do get up early to exercise or meditate before they start the day are not art-degree home-based entrepreneurs — billionaires trading in time. They are people who get up. Same hurdles in life; no different.
Win the house. Beat the corrupt seesaw. Enable New Year’s resolutions to become life changers.
I can break down my own experience — success after failure — into the following observations:
1. Do not wait until you are motivated. If you wait until you feel like it, you will probably be on target with your New Year’s resolution until the 10th of January. After that, it is the emotional wilderness, baby! Your discipline will then be tethered to the most fickle of your inner selves — your whim. We invest too much into feeling like it. “It’s a trap!” Admiral Ackbar shouts.
2. Rely on as little as possible. No, you do not need a special east-facing room built on a ley line, feng-shuied and shaman-approved to practice meditation or yoga. You do not need special running shoes, great outfits, even a yoga mat. Use what you have. It is always enough.
3. Just do it — but keep in mind, kamikaze-style lost its groove around 1988. What is the rush?! This is for life. The pirate captains of your exercise team live in your joints. They are a stubborn lot and require great seduction if you wish to coax them into working harder, flexing further.
If it is your diet you want to change, do not let your enthusiasm ruin the rave that your body is in the midst of having because the war is over. Go too fast, and your body will feel like you are gearing up for The Great Torture Session of ’14. Respect your present condition as much as the goals you aspire to achieve.
4. It will never be a straight ride. We are at A. Success is not at B. It is at freaking X with many revisions, U-turns, and sometimes, re-starts in between. Be cool.
Do not lose motivation if you just started running and your town got flooded (my story), or the town recovered from the flood and you pulled a major muscle (my story again). It is not a sign from the heavens. It is a letter in this flimsy metaphor.
What if this happened: you change your diet, everything is going fantastically, then BAM! You have to fly to Fiji and eat a diet of taro root and chocolate, or your top secret, high level diplomatic mission will surely fail (not my story).
Be cool. Get back on track when you regain control. As long as you have the reins, steer straight. If you lose your reins to life’s crazy adventure, get back on track when you regain them again.
Use the downtime to plan a cleanse, find new recipes, drink more water, learn about your Ayurvedic Dosha. You only fail at your resolution when you quit trying.
Worst saying of all time — you will hear it when your crew takes umbrage because you abandoned the doughnut ship:
“But you gotta live!”
This is the prerequisite saying to an offer of something that requires a stupid saying. No one says it before offering killer mother-of-all-salads, though that would make more sense. In fact, I shall now say this to myself every morning when I get up to meditate, practice Yoga, or run. ‘Gotting to live’ sounds synonymous to numbing and dumbing down the unbelievably intelligent and spiritual physical machine that is our body.
When you feel the wonder — and you will — of the possibilities that become available to your body when it is treated right, life becomes play — nothing less, nothing more.
*****
{You Gotta Live!}
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