Finding Your (My) Wagon Again

Part of me hopes there’ll be some kind of turning point where I’ll have to make time for it; but, another part tells me that it will be too late and I need to figure this out sooner.

I think it’s hard, very hard, in fact, to find yourself again after you’ve fallen out of a habit. You work so hard to develop a routine and a structure that you can rely on when things get tough. And when you fall out of it, you can’t. Maybe sometimes you don’t feel lost, but, at least, you feel frustrated with it. That is, of course, if you really value the thing that you’ve fallen off from.

For me, this is physical exercise. I never used to exercise that much growing up. Yes, I would do the standard school sports, grudgingly, and I’d occasionally run when I felt the motivation (which I didn’t understand at the time was a pointless endeavour). I even tried to go to the gym a few times with a friend during my final years in high school. That didn’t change much, though. I think it was because I was doing it for the wrong reasons. A lot of that in those days was to impress your friends and to look good in your rugby shorts (cringe).

That being said, those can be strong motivators if it gets you in the gym, on the track, or in the water. Either way, you’re doing something. The funny thing about really getting into exercise is that after a while those other superficial reasons start to fade away and you start to benefit from what many people don’t actually realise: Exercise is fantastic for your mind.

I want to go into this deeper in a later article, but for now, I just want to say that I experienced this enough to warrant a slight obsession. If you’ve experienced this, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Suddenly you start to notice how alert you feel, how awake you are, how after even a short run in the fresh air can supercharge your morning and your creativity.

I was talking about it with some colleagues the other day, but I used to be in the gym 5 days a week, every week. Please don’t misunderstand why I say that, though. I’m not saying it to toot my own horn here, but rather to compare it to where I was two weeks ago (pre-postgrad); where I barely went 4 days a week at a push and a shove from my gym and accountability partner.

The motivation wasn’t there like it used to be, and the desire to do it even just for my mind wasn’t as strong. I struggled to go to the gym and make time for exercise when I actually had the time. But now? Those 4 days are out the window and I’m starting to panic.

How am I going to keep this up? How do I balance the workload I have with the desire (borderline psychological need) to exercise and keep my body and mind healthy? I ask these questions rhetorically, however, because I’m not sure. Part of me hopes there’ll be some kind of turning point where I’ll have to make time for it; but, another part tells me that will be too late and I need to figure this out sooner.

Maybe the solution is to just do what I can and go from there. Start small and make sure I go where I can. To combat the procrastination and laziness that I’m feeling. That might be me being lazy (talk about a paradox) but that might be the best I can manage right now, at least until I’ve got a better plan.

If you’ve got this figured out, then I commend you, because I most definitely don’t. I suppose that’s part of the process, though. That’s life. We try, we fail, we try again. We keep going until we figure out what works best for us and then we’ve made it. Let’s just hope that’s sooner rather than later. For my sanity’s sake.