What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?
The pandemic changed many of my personal habits. I worked more and more from home and spent more of time reading, writing, and meeting online. Prior to the arrival of the pandemic and its resultant shutdowns, I walked daily 3-5 miles. During the pandemic, I gradually left the house less and less, opting for more cerebral, leisure activities. I broke my longstanding habit.
What I failed to see in breaking my walking habit was its impact on my mental and spiritual health. I maintained strong “spiritual” disciplines like prayer, meditation, journaling, reading, and wisdom mentoring; somehow I forgot that my daily connecting with nature and physical exercise was a major part of spiritual and mental health!. Everyone is a spiritual being designed for wholeness- wholeness includes intellectual, emotional, and physical-bodily components.
If you cannot do it all the way, why do it at all?
Here’s my difficult challenge: I am trying to re-enter the world of walking. I have even blogged about it recently. (Link Here) However, walking seems to be happening in fits and starts- 3 miles here, 1 mile there, miss a day, 2 miles again… it is not the “full pattern” I was following before. I am disappointed by that.
Getting disappointed invites commentary from my recovering perfectionist, all-or-nothing self: “If you cannot do it all the way, why do it at all?” How quickly something so beautiful can become so self-defeating!
Once again, I practice receiving this lapse as an invitation to be thankful when I succeed and let go of the times I fail; I find that empowers me to get up to try again. Failure to walk once is simply that: failure to walk once. I have not been sentenced to walklessness! One missed walk need not become a predictor of the future, merely an invitation to try again! So I am and do.
I never imagined when I set my sites on re-invigorating my habit of walking that it would be a challenging personal goal. Yet, it has become difficult.
Right now, I see it for what it is. An invitation to reflect and grow and try again. So I did today. Now is what I have and today I walked. One moment at a time, one day at a time, one walk at a time…
Infinitely Precious 