On Focus, Exercise, Habits, and Determination… (200th post!)

This is my 200th post. 

Normally, such milestones are cause for celebration.  The chance to prove, both to yourself and to your readers, that you are capable of staying the course for the extended period of time such an achievement requires is worth noting.  It is an accomplishment.

Yet I find myself in the position to have robbed it of most of the normal weight and heft such a moment deserves.  The responsibility for that moment is wholly and completely my own.  While I did nothing with self-malice in mind, the last six weeks have brought clarity and sharpened awareness of what it is to write and what effective writing habits for myself will one day resemble.

My latest job was… intense.  Each night, four nights one week and three the next, I would spend eleven and a half hours pushing around a cart loaded with various boxes.  The cart and boxes package could weight up to two hundred pounds.  Each work night would involve around forty five thousand steps.

Let’s put that into perspective.  A good day of walking is something like ten thousand steps.  It works out to around four miles or so, depending on height and average walking stride.  If you walked that much, each day, you would stand a very good chance of being in good shape.  Countless weight loss programs that matter all recommend this as a starting point for any successful diet.

Each night I worked, I did four times this amount.  And some change.  My feet, my ankles, my calves, and my knees all suffered appropriately. 

I am not a small man.  Although you could not tell it by looking at me, I started off this job weighing in at two hundred eighty-nine pounds or thereabouts.  I’m only five seven, so that’s not exactly a small amount of weight to carry around.  My leg muscles have always been enormous though, and that makes the weight settle far better around me.  Despite all that, however, the fact remains that I am a large man. 

This job almost broke me. 

Here and now, I weigh almost two sixty.  That’s nearly thirty pounds down, for those keeping track.  That’s in almost six weeks of work, at a steady clip of five pounds a week.  That’s way, way too fast.  I have had more things go wrong with my feet or my body than I ever thought possible.

If it had not been for my wife or my son, I would not have persisted.  Thankfully, thankfully, I managed to swap out to a different job.  My temp agency is… bad, so I hold no illusions that I will be reassigned right away like they stated I would.  That having been said, it’s far better than quitting out of self-defense.

“But Justin” you decry “what has this to do with your writing, eh?!” 

Everything.

Writing is a unique pursuit among humanity.  It is one of the most singular and varied occupations imaginable.  Across languages, across genders, across ethnicity; it is driven by each specific individual and their own life story.  Although there are countless books, Ted Talks, Youtube videos, and blog posts about writing, the fact remains that each author has a different set of criteria to be successful.  They may resemble another’s but at the end of the day it is a forced comparison, at best. 

I have found that I require certain things in order to be a writer at all, let alone a successful one.  I also have a confession: From the day this job started to go sideways on me, I have only written a few hundred words.  Across six weeks.  It’s… frightening. 

I’ve spent the last two years of my life doing everything I can to fight against my standard nature to be an author.  I don’t have any particular talent at this game.  I don’t have a past riddled with story telling or author aborning habits.  I’m not overly clever, full of quips, or even aware of a lot of the basics of story-telling.  All I have is passion and determination.  That’s enough, but it requires that I make up for my lack in other areas with effort. 

With my body in so much pain so frequently and with my weeks truncated by non-existence with this job, being an author started to die.  I’ve worked so hard, given so much of myself to the chase, and then I was forced to watch all my hard work and dedication wither across a scant month.

Even if my body had managed to adjust to the new requirements, I know now that my authoring never would have made it.  My life would slip back into a comfortable rut of conspicuous consumption and a slowly growing sense of loss.  Sure I would have my friends, my family, board games, and video games.  Yet I had all those things before I met my wife and decided to do more with my existence, and truth to tell I was miserable without knowing why.

I want my life to be about something more than my own hedonistic pursuits.  I want something meaningful to come of my time on this tiny rock hurtling through space.  I have a chance to do that, and I watched that chance slowly slip through my fingers because of physical pain and exhaustion.  I watched as I was unable to force out even a mediocre writing session because of my fatigue and the constant dread of the new work week.

Exercise is an essential part of being an author.  Again, I’m not a natural born writer or story teller.  I have to have every single edge I can give myself, and the increase in mental acuity and mindset brought on by stable, healthy daily exercise is far too valuable to overlook.  Like most things in life, however, it will require that I moderate myself.  I have seen what over-training does to both my mental outlook and my physical health, and it is not pretty.  Armed with this knowledge, I can move forward again.  I can look to become my best self, without losing my dreams.

I think, this time more than any other, I understand what it is I need to do.  I think that I’ve finally found a way to make all the things I’m trying to do meet in the middle.  That’s not nothing.

Gratefully,
Justin