Conflicting Life Lessons

I’ve been living by two mantras recently.  Or rather, I’ve been trying to live by two mantras recently:  "there is freedom in discipline" (Anna Lavesque), and "prioritizing goals over moods" (Adam Grant). The latter: "whether you aim to get in shape, learn the guitar, or write a book, the question is not whether you feel like it today. It's who you want to become tomorrow. Enthusiasm fluctuates. Consistent action accumulates."

Freedom is discipline means that consistent action and practice- doing the work- leads to an increased ability (more freedom) to do what you want to do. Like getting my butt out of bed each morning to stretch give me the flexibility and strength to do the things I want to do well into old age.  I mean, I paddled a river with a bunch 70+ year olds the other day and I thought, “yes!  I want to be able to keep doing this, and here is my model.” But it requires discipline to keep my body going and at my age, it require daily discipline in movement and lots of practice.

Remember when we were in our twenties and we could eat and drink whatever we wanted, stay up all night and sleep until noon, and be pretty much the same functional person?  Little did we know how good we had it back then.  I mean, I’ve found that while there’s so much more joy and much less angst in middle age, the body seems to feel every tiny little thing.  Oh, you drank 1 fewer glasses of water than you needed yesterday?  How about cramps, or a headache.  Oh, you gave in to pizza and beer yesterday?  How about constipation, or a headache, or general lethargy. You get the picture.

So even though I know how I will be affected by skipping out on the “maintenance”, sometimes the warm cozy bed just disagrees with discipline.  Sometimes, the mood dominates.  Because ultimately, no one is checking.  No one is holding judgement. No one is grading my performance.  Except, perhaps, myself, and I’m just not that harsh.  I rationalize, make excuses, justify, and just don’t harass myself as much as I probably should. Sometimes, it’s easier to live in the present (it’s all the rage after all), and forget, for a moment, who we want to be tomorrow, and think only of who we are right now-cozy, warm, and in bed with a snuggly cat on our feet. I can always pick up the mantras again tomorrow.  After all, tomorrow is a new day.

Herein lies the conflict of life lessons.  If we are to live each day as if it were our last, why on earth would we spend so much time on maintenance?  For what purpose are we maintaining? But if we don’t maintain, and do, in fact, live to see tomorrow, that tomorrow could feel pretty rough if we don’t maintain.  And so we heave a big sigh, remove our feet from beneath our snuggly cat, push ourselves out of bed, and do the damn maintenance, and plan a fun thing for tomorrow that will benefit from this maintenance.

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