Tag: discipline

One Saturday at a Time

Four years ago the scale read 186. Today it tells a different story. This is the Forgiveness post — the hardest of the three to write, and the most honest.

Four years ago this spring, I stepped on a scale and it read 186. I had worked for almost two years to get there, and the work had shown up everywhere. New clothes in sizes I had not worn since college. Old energy back in the legs. Knees that did not complain when I stood up from the couch. The person in the mirror looked like someone I recognized again, which was not a small thing, because for a long stretch before that I had been avoiding mirrors the way some people avoid their inbox on a Monday morning.

Today the scale tells a different story. Not the one I want to tell, and not the one I had hoped to be telling four years later. Nothing dramatic happened in between, which is the part that took me the longest to understand, and the part that matters most for what this post is actually about.

I changed jobs somewhere in that stretch. That is probably a post for another Saturday, the one about the difference between academic life and the financial world, between a calendar that breathes and a calendar that does not. I will write that one later and spare you the full tour for now. What matters here is that the new work sat me down, the old rhythms did not fit the new life, and I did not build new ones fast enough. The body did what bodies do. It adjusted to what I was actually doing, not to what I meant to be doing. Turns out bodies are excellent listeners. Mine heard every excuse I made and took detailed notes.

The return was not a week or a month or a quarter. It was four years. It came on slowly, in small unremarkable increments, the way these things almost always do. There was no decision to point at, no bad stretch I can circle on a calendar and say this is where it went wrong, no villain. Just a slow drift, measured in pants sizes and the steadily growing list of things I did not want to look at too closely. That is the hardest kind of regression to explain, because there is no story in it. A bad month has a shape to it. A bad year has a cause you can name. Four years of gradual drift has neither, which is probably why so many people end up carrying some version of it quietly, with no good way to talk about it even when they want to.

Three weeks ago I wrote about why I started. Last week I wrote about what the scale does not tell you. Focus, then Facts. I told you there would be a third one, about Forgiveness, and here we are, which was always going to be the hardest of the three to write honestly.

I would love to report that writing those first two posts fixed something, that putting it in public and naming the framework and telling all five of my readers exactly what I was going to do was enough to break the pattern. That is the version of this post I wish I could write. It is not the one I am writing, because the last month has produced no meaningful progress, and that is on me. I know what to do. I am not doing it. The focus slips somewhere around Monday, the facts become negotiable by Wednesday, and by Friday I am telling myself the week was unusual and next week will be different. The weeks are never unusual. The weeks are the point, and pretending otherwise is how four years happen in the first place.

There have been family matters this spring that have required attention, and I am not going to write about them here. There has been travel. There has been what I consider the particular stress of spring, which always seems to arrive with more on the calendar than I remember agreeing to. None of that is an excuse, and I am not offering it as one. I mention it only because pretending the last month happened in a vacuum would be its own kind of dishonesty, and this post has no room for that.

What I usually do next, after a stretch like that, is spend a few days beating myself up about it. Quietly, mostly, but thoroughly. I run through the week, count the missed walks, replay the snacks I did not need, the water I did not drink, the extra serving, the dessert, and make a long internal case against myself that no actual courtroom would have let me bring. The lawyer in me knows better. The rest of me does it anyway. It does not change a single fact about the week that already happened, and it almost always makes the next week harder than it needed to be. This is the part they leave out of every motivational poster. The part where you know exactly what you did and you sit with it anyway.

That is the thing I have come to understand about Forgiveness, and it took me longer than it should have to get here. Forgiveness is not lowering the standard. It is not telling yourself the week did not count. It is not pretending the facts are something other than what they are. It is just the part where you stop prosecuting yourself long enough to get moving again. The setback already happened. That part is finished. The only thing still in front of you is how quickly you put the case down and start the next day.

Here is what I have learned after enough Mondays and enough fresh starts to know the difference. The people who make it back are not the ones with the most discipline or the most willpower or the best plan. They are the ones with the shortest recovery time. The ones who can look at a bad week honestly, set it down without ceremony, and show up the next morning anyway. That is the whole game. Not the falling. The getting up. And how long you spend on the floor in between.

The struggle is real, and I am not going to dress that up or sell it as something it is not. The fight continues, and I am not going to promise it is going better than it is. Forgiveness is the part that lets the fight continue at all, because without it, four years of drift becomes a reason to stop trying, and with it, four years of drift becomes a starting point. The same way it was a starting point in November of 2020 when I took that picture and looked at my face and decided I was done. The starting point is wherever you are standing. It is never where you wish you were standing, and waiting until you are somewhere better before you begin is just another way of not beginning.

So this morning I walked. This morning I also hope to play golf, weather permitting. This afternoon I will make choices about what I eat, and some of them will be the right ones and some will not. Tomorrow I will do it again. The ebb and the flow is not the obstacle. The ebb and the flow is the shape of it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. Focus got me here. Facts tell me what to do now that I am here. Forgiveness is what keeps me here, on the days when here is not where I wanted to be by now. Four years. One Saturday at a time.

Six Years. Nearly 30 Million Steps. My Dog Is Thrilled.

The streak has become a daily permission slip to call the day a success. Some days it is a gift, a good conversation, an unexpected view, twenty quiet minutes nobody can touch. Other days it is just a man and his kitchen. Either way, you keep moving, and that is the philosophy.

Fair warning. If you have followed this blog for any length of time, you know what is coming. I have written about this before. My five loyal readers are nodding. The other two are still trying to find the exit. Feel free to skim. I mostly write these for myself anyway. It is cheaper than therapy and the co pay is better. Still, stay with me. Maybe something here lands for you too.

January was brutal, and I wrote about it. Somehow it became the most viewed post in the five year history of this blog. Apparently the best thing I ever did for readership was fall down. February was merely hard, and through all of it there was the streak. Today it turns six years old.

That means two thousand one hundred ninety one consecutive days. Not one missed. No exceptions. At least 10,000 steps every single day.

Nearly 30 million steps. Over 13,000 miles. An average of 13,500 steps a day. Thirteen thousand miles, on foot, mostly on ordinary days.

The last two months tested the streak more than most. I am still hurting from the fall in January, and my neck and back remind me every morning that gravity won. Some days I stand up slowly and negotiate with muscles that are not interested in compromise. There were days, more than I would like to admit, when I considered letting it go because six years felt like a respectable number. Instead, I pressed on.

Here is what that actually looks like sometimes. It is 8:57 p.m. I am tired. The weather is ugly. My neck and back are staging a formal protest. And there I am, walking circles around the main floor of my house, because every loop is 75 steps and I still need 1,256.

It is not scenic. It is not Instagram worthy. It is a middle aged man shuffling past his own kitchen for the fourteenth time while his dog watches with concerned confusion. But the steps get done and the streak survives, and somewhere in that absurd little ritual is the whole point. Some days, showing up looks nothing like you imagined, and it counts anyway.

The streak has become a daily permission slip to call the day a success. Some days it is a gift, a good conversation, an unexpected view, twenty quiet minutes nobody can touch. Other days it is just a man and his kitchen. Either way, you keep moving, and that is the philosophy.

Six years of daily movement has not made me stronger. It has made me steadier and less dramatic about hard days. I am more willing now to do the small, boring thing that keeps everything else from unraveling. The change was not heroic or loud. It was ordinary, and it stuck.

Today feels like spring’s opening act. The snow has mostly surrendered. I spotted a robin doing that smug little robin thing like it never left, and the days are stretching longer. Year seven will not be about intensity. It will be about curiosity. I want new trails, new neighborhoods, and roads I have never turned down before, because discipline got me here and curiosity can take it from here.

That is where you come in. Yes, you, all five of you plus the two still searching for the exit. If you have a favorite two or three mile route, send it my way and consider it your contribution to year seven. I cannot promise I will get to all of them, but I can promise I will keep moving.

Six years ago this started as a way to survive a pandemic. Now it is the anchor in chaotic mornings and the release valve at the end of hard days. It is quiet proof that I showed up for myself again, even when showing up meant walking past my own kitchen for the fourteenth time.

If I am honest, though, I am not the one who benefits most. Spring means real walks again, trails and air that does not sting. It means doors that open on purpose and paws that hit pavement with enthusiasm. Discipline is easier when someone is waiting by the door.

She has watched the kitchen laps and endured the treadmill indignity. She has waited on cold mornings with complete certainty that today would be worth it. She was right, because six years and nearly 30 million steps later, it was never really about mileage. In the end, it was always about the dog.