Comments (0) Well we did it.
My wife and I did our first days walk, something that’s to become part of the rest of our lives.
It felt good, the weather is sunny and warm, legs got a good stretch and lunch (a light ham salad and some fruit) tasted all the better for it.
Here’s to a life time of walking.
I want to start this week with an idea that many may find difficult to grasp; that, by and large, happiness is a choice.
I’m following on from a posting on Six Degrees Of Inspiration on this topic as it’s something I’ve believed myself since my mid-thirties. At that time I was living with an ex-girlfriend because he house we’d bought together had so much negative equity we couldn’t sell it, our business had gone bust and we were in serious debt. I was far from happy.
Then I can distinctly recall one morning thinking to myself, “I am not going to put up with feeling depressed anymore”. In that instant of choice my depression lifted.
The reason why I’ve added a caveat “by and large” to my statement above is because whilst I believe it’s a choice to be happy I don’t believe that everyone is in a position to make that choice. Some people (and someone I’m very close to) suffer from clinical depression which is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Do these folks have the luxury of a choice in this matter?
Finally the post on 6doi.net has some excellent quotes and I’m going to take the liberty of reproducing them here;
Happiness is a way station between too little and too much.
Channing Pollock (1880 – 1946)
Happiness is a present attitude… not a future condition.
Hugh Prather
Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now.
The place to be happy is here.
The way to be happy is to make others so.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833 – 1899)
All these seem to be saying to me that happiness is Now!
Here’s something I learnt today:
That 1lb of body fat contains about 4100 calories.
Here’s something else:
In one hour of aerobic exercise I can expect to burn about 300 calories.
So to burn off 1lb of fat I’ve got to exercise for 13 hours and 40 minutes.
Wow! That’s a lot of exercise!
This is a time of upheaval in my life with my permanent job coming to an end at the end of May and I’m in the process of reviewing all areas of my life. In GTD terms I’m doing a full review at 50,000 feet.
One of the areas I’ve really let slip over the years, if I ever had a grip on it at all, is my overall fitness level and in particular my weight. Some time ago quality pair of scales, the sort that tell you your fat and water percentages; but when I got on them yesterday I realized it was about 12 months since I last weighed myself. No need to tell you that I had put on weight!
So my current weight is 197lbs and my ideal (target) weight for a man my height is 173lbs. That’s 24lbs I’ve got to loose. Ouch! In fact I’m only 0.8 Body Mass Index (BMI) points away from being obese (double ouch).
OK, this is getting depressing. Let’s move on.
This goal is intended to contribute to the overall goal of improving my fitness and loosing those 24lbs. Note that I’m not defining the weight loss goal here as I have to do some more work defining that one. This goal is to start me back to gaining some sort of fitness as well as making a small contribution to losing weight.
The goal is to walk for 20 minutes, unencumbered, 3 days a week for a month.
This may not seem like a very arduous goal to achieve; but in the past I’ve set goals like this that were doomed to failure from the off because they were over ambitious. For example; walk for an hour 3 times a week. An hour for me is a long time to fit in around all my work and personal commitments and it was very rare for me to actually get away from my desk for an hour.
On the other hand 20 minutes is just 10 minutes outbound and then home again. This I’m sure I can do and part of the idea of doing this for a month is to establish the walking goal as a habit. The “unencumbered” bit is to stop me from hanging my camera and / or binoculars round my neck which are guaranteed to slow me down. This is walking for exercise sake and nothing else.
The intention is that if I can achieve this for a month then I increase the time to 30 minutes for a month, then 40 minutes and so on; but let’s get this month over with first.
So I have tomorrow marked as the first day and the end date is 7th May.
Here goes….
That I have a choice.
Judi Sohn on the Web Worker Daily blog posted a great article about how to be Productively Unproductive Online. Without Guilt.. I’m not sure I agree with all of the points about being unproductive being ‘OK’; but it was the guilt thing that was an apt reminder for me.
We all have a choice in how we spend our time, be it productively or unproductively. If we recognize that the choice is ours and take responsibility for having made that choice then there is no guilt. It simply cannot exist in an environment where we take responsibility for our choices.
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