In either case, a regular, more substantive post shall be forthcoming relatively soon. I promise. If nothing else, I’m going on a day long Viking boat voyage on the Ohio river this Saturday, which should give me something interesting to write about. Hopefully it amounts to more than “damn, do I have a bad sunburn!”

In the meantime, I hope all of you stay well!

I posted a little under a year ago about being in a Buddhist meditation group. The group has since had some problems in getting together, mostly due to scheduling conflicts between us. It’s amazing how difficult it can be to get 3-4 people together in one place for an hour… but I digress. What of my own daily meditation, which I had been doing at the time? Good question. I’m not sure what happened. My zafu and zabuton are still set up in my room, but I’ve sat down there once in months (a few days ago). Why? I just can’t bring myself to do it every day. I still want to, and I have the time, but when it comes around to doing it, something in my head just says “meh”, and I go do something else. And then the next day rolls around, I think “I should meditate”, and yet I don’t.

The same thing happened with my attempt at a health reboot. I had started keeping tabs on what I was eating, and I was exercising daily. And then I slipped, and then slipped again, and then I just fell back into the habits I’d had before: not exercising, eating generally like crap, and feeling bad about it the whole time. I’ve recently tried to get back into exercising, but it’s been a rather halting start. I’ve had more off days than on days, and unless that flips around, I’ll probably quit altogether. It was easy for me to start, as I found a form of exercise that I genuinely enjoy: kickboxing. I got into it, even going so far as to buy a punching bag (and to go to the considerable bother of hanging the thing, which was more difficult than I had anticipated.) But starting and staying the course are proving, of course, to be two different things. I’ve had the bag for around three weeks now, and it’s been used on 4 or 5 times. That’s not going to cut it.

So what’s the deal?

That’s the million dollar question, right? Well, here’s the problem: apparently, I’m human. Really. I did some googling on changing habits, and found that what I’m struggling with is pretty common. “Good habits are hard to develop but easy to live with, bad habits are easy to develop but hard to live with” is a quote from Brian Tracey, a motivational speaker, and is perhaps the shortest and clearest summation of what I’m struggling with. The cliché “humans are creatures of habit” is a cliché for a reason, after all. We get stuck in our ways and often, it takes more than just brute willpower to change them.

Leo at Zen Habits (love the blog name) has a good post on things to avoid when changing habits, which of course is full of things I’ve been doing when attempting these changes. And I do mean full – I think I’m guilty of every single thing on his list. Probably the biggest thing I’m guilty of is not maintaining accountability. I posted here in the past about exercising, about meditation, and then said nothing more of it. In “real life” (whatever the frak that means anymore, right?), I was also pretty quiet about my intentions to change myself. Certainly, my wife knew, my mom knew, but I hadn’t really talked to them in depth about my goals. It was more like, out of the blue, I said “oh, by the way, I’m going to exercise / meditate / whatever every day, poke me if you notice I’m not doing so, mmkay?” I’m sure they responded in the positive, and then soon after forgot about me ever having said anything

But, that’s not really their problem. It’s not their responsibility, or anyone else’s for that matter, to make me accountable. I have to do that. I’m not really sure how I’m going to do that for my exercising and meditation, though. I could certainly post about it here, but every day? Doubtful on that. Twitter? Maybe, but there’s an awful lot of noise on Twitter, so I’m not really sure anyone would notice if I didn’t post a tweet of “exercised for the day” or whatever. Leo made a training blog to help keep him accountable, but I’m not really sure if I want to go that route; I’ve already got two blogs, and if I make a blog for every habit I wish to make or change… well, I don’t have that much time to blog! Perhaps I’ll just talk to the family again, in more depth, and ask them to make me give a report each day. Or I could put up a calendar somewhere (the fridge would be wonderfully clichéd but practical), and mark the days I did whatever it is I’m wanting to be doing. I’ll think on it some more.

But, like I said, I’m guilty of more than just not keeping myself accountable for my goals. After reading Leo’s post, I realize that I’ve been failing pretty much everytime because when I’ve tried to change my habits, it’s been a rather spur of the moment “hey, I’m gonna’ do this!” sort of thing, with little no planning. I never wrote down any plan, especially nothing specific; I didn’t think about obstacles, I was just going to do it, by the gods! And we see how well that goes. No meditation in more or less months, and my newfound kickboxing routine quickly disappearing into that pile of vague memories which start with “Hey, I remember when I tried doing that…”

So, the gameplan: keep Leo’s list of “things to avoid” in mind, while I figure out how I’m going to go about making a 30 minute meditation session and a 30-45 minute exercise session part of my daily routine. But as per his advice, one of those is going on the shelf for a bit; you’re not supposed to tackle two habits at once More on this after I’ve thought about it some more and done a bit more research. And if you’ve not seen anything on this blog within a few weeks about this, call me on it. All of ya’.

I’ve just logged in and posted a twitter (I can’t bring myself to call them tweets), the first since mid-November. And yet since then, I’ve still had 6 or 7 people I don’t know start following me. What’s the deal? I don’t have a problem with it – if I did, I wouldn’t have a Twitter account. But I don’t understand it, either. On Twitter, I follow people that I know from other networks (mostly 9rules), and I don’t feel a great urge to follow hundreds of random people that I’ve never spoken to or emailed before. Do these people who are following me (and hundreds of other people – I’ve looked!) really care about what I post to Twitter? Or is it just a collection game?

I feel like I’m just an item on their page, as if they’re collecting bottle caps or stamps. I felt the same way on MySpace (which I no longer use) and Facebook (which I log into about once a month). It seems that the collecting of friends and faces is more important than actually communicating and forming relationships with the people.