discipline

Instead of new year's resolutions, I tend to come up with a general theme that I want to focus on for the year. Last year, it was being stoked--choosing to be excited about life and opportunities. This year, my theme was (and is) discipline: doing the things I need to do, even when I don't feel like it.

Originally, I decided on discipline to help me stay focused on the things I really want to get better at this year. For running, it meant going out even in the freezing 5am rain before school to get in shape for my upcoming ultra, or scheduling the three or four hour weekend runs before the other, more glamorous weekend options. It meant spending time writing. It meant playing the piano even when I got home and didn't want to practice. It meant reading things of quality, not just the young adult two-hour books that I screen for my students. It meant eating well, which is much harder when I so love to bake vegan cookies:) Basically, when I decided on discipline, I meant it to help me do the things that are sometimes hard to get started on, even though I'm happier when I'm doing them.

I mention this because--like all new years resolutions or life goals--this has been hard at times. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about: everything will be going well, then something messes one up one little aspect of life and everything else starts to slide. My foot, for example. For a few weeks, I thought I had a stress fracture or some other such heinous and painful annoyance in my heel. I stopped running for a week, then two, then three. And when I'm not running, the laziness spills over into other parts of my life as well. I don't play piano. I read dumb internet stuff instead of writing. I'm not sure why letting one part of life slide affects all the others, but that seems to be the case for me.

So now I find myself in the process of trying to reclaim the discipline. My foot feels better; I should be running. But now after not having done it well for a while, it's fricken hard. I'm getting back into it, I mean, but it's so easy to slip back into sloth-hood when running isn't the effortless flying that I love. It's so easy to eat shitty food when running feels hard anyway so diet doesn't seem all that important to performance. And it's so easy, when I'm already being lazy about one thing, to be lazy about everything.

But I don't want to do what's easy; I want to do what ultimately makes me feel like I've earned my own self-respect. So it's back to the discipline, albeit begrudgingly at times. Back on track.