I am at the crossroads here of a brand new year, a brand new decade, my first bona fide adult decade, my birthday, and the beginning of the second quarter-century of my life. Clearly, this is a prime opportunity for change — for my second twenty-five years to be enormously more positive and productive than my first twenty-five. I am also preparing (again) for a major move; this one will be a return home. I feel very strongly that I need to be prepared for that. I cannot return home in this condition; I need to have something to show for myself, my travels, the life I have lived since I left.
The first stage is my health — with that out of whack, nothing else will come together for me and I am very aware of that. Embracing the Primal Blueprint will go a long way for me. I will wake up every morning at 6:30 and take the dog for a walk, and I will bring all my clean food and snacks for the day when I go to work. At lunch I will take a half hour nap instead of hitting up soda or sugar, and after work I will hit the gym before I come home. Once a week I will do all-out sprints, once a week I will do an intense, short HIIT workout, and twice a week I will lift according to Alwyn Cosgrove’s plan. After I go home and feed the dog, we will go for a short after-dinner walk, and then I will unwind — because I will be in bed at or before 10:30 pm. These are not new ideas to those of you who read this blog, and I have to admit that even though I have thought of these things I haven’t implemented them well. However, I am starting the 30 Day program proposed by Whole9 (previously linked under the now-defunct Urban Gets Diesel) on 1/16 (as in, the day after I eat my slice of birthday cake), and that will help me to cleanse my system and get into the swing of things. I will just have to adapt from there — putting myself to bed early if I’m tempted to indulge, reminding myself that the inner voice that wants that junk food or pasta is like a little kid begging for Pepsi and Skittles at bedtime, and knowing that I am doing the best thing for myself by avoiding all the poison I have eaten with unbridled pleasure to this point and hitting all those workouts with delight.
The second arena for change is financial, and there are already a lot of things going on in this arena just eight days into the new year! First I was asked to work at another hospital part-time, a sort of sharing, which I gladly accepted and was thrilled about. This somehow triggered my hospital to ask me to go full-time, which I did another happy dance about as I filled out the appropriate form and faxed it in right away. That same day (two days ago), I got a call from the PetsHotel saying that they would be looking for someone soon and they noticed I’d applied for a job back in November for overnight shifts and would I still be interested? Yes, yes, yes. So hopefully soon I will be hearing about that, and that will be one or two overnight shifts a week that I will somehow have to fit into my health and wellness “schedule.” I am very excited about the prospect of this, and basically sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for a call from the manager there.
All of this will go a long way towards helping me with the resolution to stop wasting so much time on the internet and watching mind-numbing TV. However, in an effort to spend my time doing meaningful, purposeful things, I will also be volunteering at a children’s shelter not far from here. I went for a meeting today and am very excited about getting involved there. Mostly, I am interested in chaperoning fun outings with the little kids, and maybe getting involved once in awhile at bedtime — reading stories, tucking in, things like that. Today while I was touring, we came across a toddler in his crib who was supposed to be napping but was not — that was the fullest my heart has felt in a long time, with that kid smiling at me and being able to smile back. I am hoping for lots more of that.
There is also a lot of opportunity for me to work on myself while I am here. I know that I’ve done a lot of that the past couple years, but now I’m going to focus on it even more. For me, right now, that means thoroughly exploring my spirituality. I have a stack of books that I intend to work through one at a time, although I’ve kind of jumped in headfirst and have three underway at the moment, and I’m very interested in following this path and really growing as a person and becoming more who I really am.
And through all of this, I will emerge — vibrant, positive, happy, healthy, financially secure, confident in who I am.
Once I make it back home, there will be more things to tackle and more goals to achieve. In order to be able to push myself to those limits, I have to first conquer the basics and be very strong in who I am. The benchmark is birthday to birthday, especially in terms of my health (as in, I will be able to truly gauge how far I’ve come by thinking back on this birthday when I reach my next). So here we go. Not only will twenty-six be the best year yet, but it will be a million times better than all the other years combined.
