I have not been around here for a while. In fact, I have probably not written a post in the better part of a year, which is a sign of everything else in my life. Over the last few months I slowly but surely slid down the slope of discipline into the void of randomness.
Last summer I was in extremely good shape which was only a manifestation of the discipline that I had practiced. I could do anything that I wanted and I had great confidence in my abilities and this year I have had aches and pains and hardly any energy to play with the kids. The sharp contrast was all to obvious and heightened by the thought of having to start all over again by myself. While I was working out with Shane it was somewhat easier since I had someone to do the work with and most importantly, I had someone with whom to reflect.
This is where loneliness starts. Some people enjoy to have a lot of time on their own and in some cases it seems to burden them to have to spend too much time with others (if you are one of those, this post will make little sense for you! 😀 ).
This is were life has become isolating. It is not so bad once you get started but having to muster the focus to get started can be overwhelming. The fact is that in the end you are alone in this world. There might be people that love you and like to be with you, but you are still alone. Stuck in a small head, behind a pair of eyes and ears. You can absorb all you want but you have to decide how to process it all. Discipline for me is the ability to focus ones energy to the task at hand repeatedly and systematically while maintaining command of ones thoughts. It is infused with a certain purity of mind, heart, soul and body.
This is where the loneliness lives. I have had to face this demon again. I will have to reflect on my own. I will have to take charge once again. But only in this way will life really mean something.
ae
I thought I would share a quote that helped me in the first few days of starting again.
“Sharp must be thy sight and adamant thy soul, and brass-like thy feet, if thou wishest to be unshaken by the assaults of the selfish desires that whisper in men’s breasts.”
~ Bahá’u’lláh
Gym Jane! 
Reading this entry, I thought of slogans heard in yoga class:
– Drop what you know
– Suffering is optional
– Be here now
– Get out of your head and into your body
Good work chris! Way to get lonely and show that Kettlebell who is boss! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! Just be glad shane hasn’t shown you Flowfit yet- then you would really be lonely!
I can totally relate to this post. I struggle with discipline too and certainly feel lonely when I realize it’s all up too me…. Although I like to blame my husband when I forget to pray 😉
I just had to ask Todd what he meant by ‘suffering is optional.’ My thought was that once we made a decision to do something we had to live with the pain it would bring.
Here is Todd’s take, which I found valuable but hard to do!
From Todd:
“For me, ‘suffering is optional’ means two things:
1) living with your faults, your choices, your regrets and going forward rather than punishing yourself, feeling undeserving, waiting for… and
2) embracing, feeling, knowing “pain” rather than immediately reacting to it”
ae
Janna:
The thing is that once you get over the hump it does not feel lonely anymore.
I think! hehehe
ae
Wow, what am amazing post. I like how you have connected self discipline with loneliness not because it is the right connection to make, but it is the association that you have with self discipline. For the longest time self discipline had a really bad association in my mind with the kind of bad leadership that exists in the world because they are always claiming that others don’t have discipline. So whenever I went for being more disciplined I always seemed to run up against bad leadership. It just has had the repeated effect of starting and then stopping instead of a long continuous work. What I have observed as the athletic director for the last four years is that the athletes who make the most improvement are the ones that play everyday with a group of others who are doing the same. They seem to work the hardest when others are doing it with them. I also notice that I seem to always run faster and have more energy when I am running with someone else. I am completely against doing exercise without doing some other end like competition or a game of soccer, tennis, squash because it just becomes a lonely grind. The most fun I have is when I am playing a game with my friends….
I have really struggled with self-discipline this last year too. There were two things that forced me into it – the restless leg syndrome when I was pregnant, which forced me to get out and walk every night, and then Isabela going to school, which forced me to wake up early everyday. And then I realized, since I was already waking up early, it wasn’t so hard to wake up just a few minutes earlier each day in order to do all those things that fill up my body and soul, like exercise and prayer. It was definitely that getting started part that was brutal for me too. Listen to music helped make my walks a lot more fun and less lonely as well (thanks to my new ipod from you!)
I’m now going to remember to bookmark this site. I just got reminded of how inspirational it is to come to because of Shane’s email he sent out re: gymnosevolution . And this post…. although I know it, I always forget that I’m not the only one that goes through everything in life. I may have to come to my own conclusions and own my decisions and choices for them to be effective, but to see read about what other people go through and the conclusions they came to is an inspiration.
Thanks 🙂