Early Difficulties

One of the ways I'm going to make this work is by reporting on my difficulties in the process. I am acknowledging at the top of my pursuits, even before officially starting, that what I am going to undertake is going to be incredibly difficult, especially at the beginning.

My goal is to start this lifetime transformation on November 1st. I'm using this remaining week to fully develop the first three months of my plan so that I can avoid any pitfalls. So recording my temptations and failures and successes at containing those temptations is going to be extremely important to my progress.

Yesterday, I typed up my manifesto for the first part of the day, after doing my morning routine of yoga, physical therapy, and meditation. I ran some errands quickly and then left to go surfing, which I ended up doing for an hour/hour and a half (after being stuck in traffic for just as long). Then I just relaxed at my surfing buddy's place until my boyfriend got off work. I picked him up, from work, and we got home and relaxed for a bit, and started to do some more brainstorming work on our musical. Then we watched the Simpsons for a bit and he went to bed. I "couldn't sleep" again and ended uo staying up until 4 jacking off at least 3 times. But one of the things I jacked off to was thinking about my goals, where I wanted to be as opposed to jacking off simply to the images of other guys. Not that this is better, since I did break a rule.

So, what could I have done better yesterday? Well, I have a bunch of design work that's coming due that I'm not prepared for. I have to load in a system at the Alexandria, and I haven't even acquired all the pieces and parts to do that. I used surfing as my workout for the day, and I did manage to start the day with my morning routine. However, after surfing I pretty much crashed and let the rest of the day fail. But the thing that perpetuated it was the realization that I should never have gone surfing in the first place. I didn't have the time to spend on it, but I did it anyway. I also shouldn't have gone to bed so late, there was no reason, and it set up today for failure as well.

So it seems that, upon examination, my fault for yesterday was a lack of mindfulness. I did not have my obligations for the week clearly in my mind, so when it came to making decisions about how to spend my day, I ignored my obligations and I'm going to pay for it with a lack of focus this weekend.

A lot of this is residual problems from overbooking myself, so this mindfulness is going to have be total awareness of my schedule and obligations to myself and to my work. The reason I'm starting this self-improvement process on November 2nd is that is a day sufficiently far in the future and it's the first day the craziness of this October schedule clears up (I intended to start November 1st, but that day is very packed, and I'll be at Halloween Horror Nights until early in the morning.

So it seems that the most useful thing for me to be doing to finish out this month is to begin practicing mindfulness as it concerns my planning and actions. For instance: be mindful and care enough about myself to make sure I go to bed on time each night, and to make sure I spend the time I need to on my work so I don't go crazy and lose focus later. It's going to be a painful process at first, but when I start moving smoothly after a few weeks, all the things I perceive as sacrifices begin to pay off as strengths.

I'm working on some specific goals going forward, but I think for the next two weeks I'm going to principally focus on sleep and whatever regularity I can manage with my crappy schedule.

All the best,

j