Day 295 of 365 - An End In Sight?
Past the nine month mark now, it feels like an appropriate time for me to review why I'm doing this blog challenge, and especially on this theme of my ongoing search for health and vitality. It seems to me that I've been on some kind of self-improvement path or other most of my life. At different stages of life, the focus has simply shifted.
First, it was to be a better kid, then a better student. After that it was being a better employee, a better wife, a better mother. Interspersed in there add a better church member, a better committee member and a better helper to others in need. Those mostly provided my focus and goals in the first 40 years of my life. Since then, a lot of those were ongoing, some dropped in my fifties, and the direction shift to more personal development, health and wellness has been primary.
For a lot of my life it seemed as if I were seeking some end goal that would provide the satisfaction of having made it, ... somewhere. Ideas along the lines of 'if I could just ..., I'll be satisfied' pushed me forward. But, of course, life keeps throwing curve balls at us to show us that it's all about change, adaptability and resilience.
In the past 25 years, what life has placed in my path is teaching me to focus more on acknowledging and taking care of my own needs. It has taken many years to believe that this is not selfish and that it has equal importance to taking care of the needs of others. Symptoms of a depleted body, mind and spirit woke me up to that.
Since my body is my vehicle for this life I'm living, I would like it to have health and vitality. As signs of depletion of those crept in over time, I realized they needed to be addressed with more attention. I've tried different things that worked for a time, and then did not, or caused yet other issues. For example, when I first started feeling pain in the joints of my hands in my forties, my doctor prescribed a high dose anti-inflammatory. It actually worked well, but the reading I did taught me that it was not a good long term solution due to troublesome side effects. Still later in my forties,I strained my back and learned that lesson again. Yes, pain medication could give me relief, but would it cure the underlying cause?
Those kinds of things prompted me to explore alternatives and to look at root causes which needed to be tended, whether at the body, mind or spirit level. That pretty much explains in a nutshell why I do the learning, reading and listening about a variety of topics that I do.
When I decided to do the blog challenge, I thought it would mostly be about the variety of areas I had already explored and talked about with others. It would also be a strong motivator to keep me on track, as I started it after I had successfully met a health and wellness goal. But, doing this daily writing has morphed into more.
It's a bigger commitment that I expected, mostly due to self-imposed pressure to try to come up with something interesting each day. It's on my mind from the time I get up until the writing is completed for the day and typed as a draft on the blog site. This could be a short time, or a long time, depending on how much I choose to research and how lost I get in the writing. Currently, my goal is to stay at least one day ahead of schedule in my drafts, to reduce the pressure. Then, if some situation arises that prevents me from writing on a given day, I still have something to post.
Now that I'm in the last several weeks, it's helpful for me to see patterns that arise. I've always been future result driven, but my life is happening in the present moment. One of the gifts of the writing has been to experience the pleasure of the writing process in that present time. There will be no 'end' to my search for health and vitality. I won't have found 'the answer' by the time this blog challenge ends. But, I will have more practices available to me from what I have learned. Those will remind me that I do have the capacity to handle life. After all, I have done so for nearly 65 years, and can keep doing so, reinforcing the good habits with repetition, day by day, present moment by present moment.
First, it was to be a better kid, then a better student. After that it was being a better employee, a better wife, a better mother. Interspersed in there add a better church member, a better committee member and a better helper to others in need. Those mostly provided my focus and goals in the first 40 years of my life. Since then, a lot of those were ongoing, some dropped in my fifties, and the direction shift to more personal development, health and wellness has been primary.
For a lot of my life it seemed as if I were seeking some end goal that would provide the satisfaction of having made it, ... somewhere. Ideas along the lines of 'if I could just ..., I'll be satisfied' pushed me forward. But, of course, life keeps throwing curve balls at us to show us that it's all about change, adaptability and resilience.
In the past 25 years, what life has placed in my path is teaching me to focus more on acknowledging and taking care of my own needs. It has taken many years to believe that this is not selfish and that it has equal importance to taking care of the needs of others. Symptoms of a depleted body, mind and spirit woke me up to that.
Since my body is my vehicle for this life I'm living, I would like it to have health and vitality. As signs of depletion of those crept in over time, I realized they needed to be addressed with more attention. I've tried different things that worked for a time, and then did not, or caused yet other issues. For example, when I first started feeling pain in the joints of my hands in my forties, my doctor prescribed a high dose anti-inflammatory. It actually worked well, but the reading I did taught me that it was not a good long term solution due to troublesome side effects. Still later in my forties,I strained my back and learned that lesson again. Yes, pain medication could give me relief, but would it cure the underlying cause?
Those kinds of things prompted me to explore alternatives and to look at root causes which needed to be tended, whether at the body, mind or spirit level. That pretty much explains in a nutshell why I do the learning, reading and listening about a variety of topics that I do.
When I decided to do the blog challenge, I thought it would mostly be about the variety of areas I had already explored and talked about with others. It would also be a strong motivator to keep me on track, as I started it after I had successfully met a health and wellness goal. But, doing this daily writing has morphed into more.
It's a bigger commitment that I expected, mostly due to self-imposed pressure to try to come up with something interesting each day. It's on my mind from the time I get up until the writing is completed for the day and typed as a draft on the blog site. This could be a short time, or a long time, depending on how much I choose to research and how lost I get in the writing. Currently, my goal is to stay at least one day ahead of schedule in my drafts, to reduce the pressure. Then, if some situation arises that prevents me from writing on a given day, I still have something to post.
Now that I'm in the last several weeks, it's helpful for me to see patterns that arise. I've always been future result driven, but my life is happening in the present moment. One of the gifts of the writing has been to experience the pleasure of the writing process in that present time. There will be no 'end' to my search for health and vitality. I won't have found 'the answer' by the time this blog challenge ends. But, I will have more practices available to me from what I have learned. Those will remind me that I do have the capacity to handle life. After all, I have done so for nearly 65 years, and can keep doing so, reinforcing the good habits with repetition, day by day, present moment by present moment.
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