I did not want to get up last night at 12:30am and do my second exercise workout for the day. My power went out late last night in the hotel and with virtually no hot water left in the small water tank above the toilet, I didn’t want to go through a workout and then take a cold shower afterwards. Rishikesh gets a bit chilly at night as it is and my hotel room doesn’t have a heater.
So going to sleep with the intention of sleeping through the night, I awoke before midnight and noticed the power had kicked back on while I was sleeping. I decided to stay up for a bit and take advantage of having WiFi as it’s become somewhat unpredictable over the past couple days.
At half past midnight, a little voice inside my head whispered:
“You could work out, you know. There’s hot water now.”
Ah, fuck…really? I’m snuggled in bed, it’s not particularly warm in my room, and technically it’s the next day. I don’t *have* to do it.
And I was right. I didn’t have to. It wasn’t required. No one was adding a gold star to the calendar to give me my just rewards at the end of the week. But if we’re going to start rolling the boulder down the hill, I also didn’t have to do anything I have been doing during this lockdown or in my daily life as a whole.
The reverse to all of this is that one of the things getting me through this lockdown in good spirits and making it meaningful is the decision to do something with it, to make something happen over these days and weeks, to — as I keep coming back to — “Use this time to do what you love.” (And I do love to exercise.)
Yes, I know I’ve been saying this for the past few days to the point that I can no longer blame the record for being broken. It’s clearly intentional by now.
But not all insights are new and sometimes the very purpose of their nature is to repeat so frequently and so incessantly that we can’t ignore them until they become ingrained in the DNA of our choices.
So what did I do? I went back to sleep.
But before that, I got out of bed, finished my second workout of the day and after a 400 mountain climber EMOM, I was rewarded with a warm shower and grumbling stomach that clearly wasn’t on board with my intermittent fasting schedule.
But sleep beats hunger every time.
WRITING REFLECTIONS
It was precisely the fact that I didn’t want to do the workout that was a pivotal driving force to actually do it. It sounds counterintuitive I know.
To make sense of it, flashback to the last five months of 2019 in Thailand where I worked on two particular traits more so than others:
- Emotional Fortitude
- Consistency
I felt I needed to cultivate these to move forward in my life and to do this, it required me to understand their value beyond just intellectual knowhow by seeing firsthand the effect they can have in my life.
My goal was to 1) be able to better control my emotions or at the very least not let them control me and 2) learn to act consistently regardless of how I feel or external circumstances. These two characteristics had a level of overlap and synergy as I’ve found most internal work does.
During my “training,” I had a good amount of success to the point that I could see proof of concept. I was by no means a master of these then or now, nor will I likely ever be, but I clearly saw a marked improvement and had tangible evidence that my efforts had worked and could continue to do so going forward.
There are two things that stand out even now as transformative in my understanding of how to improve these traits in myself.
One was from the book “The 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do” which discussed how your emotions don’t have to be the deciding factor for whether or not you do something. You can evaluate them as a source of information just as you can your thoughts, external factors, advice from friends and anything else from here to the stars.
In short, as the author states, you can choose to act in accordance with your emotions or contrary to them.
The second example, along the same lines, was a video from an elite fitness athlete on Instagram who explained how motivation wasn’t a necessity to go to the gym. You can go regardless of how you feel.
So to bring this back around, if you don’t want to get out of bed in the morning, or in my case at 12:30 at night, that’s okay. It’s simply how you’re feeling in the moment —
But you can still decide to get out bed.
Your actions don’t have to align with your emotions (this is meant to be used for good and not 👿).
And of course the key to all of this, if you didn’t catch it, is putting it into action. Without that, it’s all just fodder for late night conversations over a whiskey and coke.
The larger point in this, if I have one, is that traits *can* be cultivated. You can become a stronger version of yourself, a kinder version, a more determined or less fearful version.
Whatever version you decide you want to be.
The measure of our internal attributes aren’t predetermined at birth. Some of us may be more inclined towards one trait over another, perhaps having learned it at an earlier time in life through example or difficulty, but these traits are still equal parts of a whole that one can decide to make a greater percentage of their internal pie — or better yet increase the size of the entire pie altogether.
And though they are less of an occurrence than before, I still have moments of struggle with being consistent as well as times when my emotions get the better of me. It is part of growth to stumble and fall, to take a step back and feel as though no progress has been made despite our immense and exhaustive efforts. Fears and doubts and whispers that the dark hour is nipping at our heels are always present.
But those too are traits that we all have — and in that, we can take solace in how alike we truly are, understanding that despite our best efforts, that no matter how consistently disciplined or emotionally strong or valiantly brave we become, we still need each other.
And that is perhaps the best trait of all.