Glad I'm not a smoker
Today I walked home from work. It's about a 40 min walk, but I went a longer way so I could check out the best way for me to ride to work. ACoopers4me posted yesterday about his exercise regime of a lunch time (and his sheer hatred of running, which I in fact share) and that really prompted me to get my arse in gear and get some regular exercise back in to my life.
So I walked home, and I will start riding to work occasionally and walking home more often. But in reality it'll be after this week (of dooooooooom!). But as I was walking home, I thought a lot about habits, and forming habits, breaking them and so on.
It takes something like 3 weeks to break a habit but 6 weeks to form a new one. What stupid greater power thought that would be a good idea?!?!
I think Laziness is one of my biggest habits I need to break. Funnily enough, weekends are fine. I jam pack my weekends with lots of fun things which make me love my life. I also tend to fill my weeknights with other great social things. But, when it comes to the important things, health, exercise, eating healthy, washing my clothes and doing the chores, I am super lazy and can find all sorts or distractions and excuses.
While responding to ACoopers4me's post, I said I will eventually get around to riding to work and exercising more. Mid sentence I realised what I was doing, making room for the excuse (currently stress at work). So instead I committed to walking home and made sure it happened. But that's just one instance in what will take at least 6 weeks to develop in to a regular, don't need to think about it, habit.
On my 40 min walk, I thought a lot more about broader habits. Not just physical habits that affect your health and well being. It's been an interesting couple of weeks. I hear a lot from a lot of people. I also read people's blogs and posts on facebook. I know a lot of single people - perhaps I just notice them more lately, but it makes me think about the habits we form in relationships.
I've been talking to a few guys from online dating sites as well, and particularly one tonight who has been separated from his wife for the last 3 months. They were together 9 years and married for 3 of those. Sounds like an amicable break up really. It truly sounds like they had both moved on from the relationship before it even ended. And I began to think to myself that they had stayed together out of habit rather than love and desire for a life together.
It's so easy to do, take your loved one for granted, forget to tell them you love them, forget to make the extra effort. But perhaps these things are the things that should have been made habit early in relationships. I don't want to say bad habits can't be broken, because they can. I just think there's a different dynamic to habits which are based in shared emotion.
Changing a habit about yourself, for yourself is much easier.
For example, some of you may remember that I undertook considerable effort to lose 30kg a couple of years ago. It was actually really easy. I chose to utilise Lite n Easy for my food. I started going to Pilates one a week, conveniently supplied at work. I started walking and extra 15 mins per day, making a total of 45 mins walking to and from public transport every day.
Excuse: unfortunately those good habits fell out of place when my life shifted me repeatedly and I have not rebuilt the habits in to my life. So, now I need to buck up, and break the bad lazy habit, and build exercise in to my life again.
But emotional habits might be harder to change. I'm an emotional eater, I'm not actually sure how to break that behaviour, I'll let you know if I figure it out.
I'm not in a relationship at the moment, so I guess I can only surmise, prepare and think about the healthy relationship habits I want in my life. I can't help but think I have already started adding healthy relationship habits to my life through nurturing friendships and connections both new and old. But I must also remember to take note of the things my friends do for me, or the things I see them do in their own relationships.
I think habits and observations go hand in hand. But I don't know that we ever engage both at once.
I do wish that in the past I had had the opportunity to observe and alter my own habits, and perhaps challenge the habits of those around me that weren't healthy for me. But I guess that's the point, you learn from experience. I know someone who is currently making the effort to try again on a relationship, alter and break the bad habits and nurture the good habits. I wish I'd had that opportunity, so I'm glad they are making ago of it. Conversely, i also heard a conversation by someone admitting that their marriage was over, but I don't think they'd discussed it with their partner yet, admitting having left the relationship emotionally by emerging themselves in work and distractions, yet not actually having physically left. It can't be an easy process.
But, a part of me wonders whether trying to make a relationship work when it is or has failed, is just because the habit of being in a relationship is more comfortable than stepping out in to the unknown. Hmmm, I must be channeling JD's Devil's Advocate power.
I know in the past I have gone back to relationships or even fallen in to extended liaisons out of that desire for comfort and habit of having someone there. Ultimately they either haven't worked, have been bad for me or just were never going to work. But I guess that's where observation failed me, I failed to look for warning signs, look to see if the situation was right for me, look and see if the opportunity was right for 'us'.
See, habit and observation.
I must tell you a story. I love my Mum, she hated my first boyfriend, Chris. We only dated for a month or two, when I was 18 and he was 25. This was 10 years ago and just before I was heading off to the USA for what eventually became a 5 month stint. We'd been dating a month and he knew I was heading overseas, so a few weeks before I was due to leave, he proposed to me (next to the swimming pool in his parent's trailer park no less! He didn't even get down on one knee). I don't know that I said no, but I certainly didn't accept, despite his protestations that he'll wait for me and that his parents had married young, after knowing each other only a short time. I went overseas and had a great time. He started seeing someone else while I was overseas, and admittedly, after 4 months and his contact having stopped after mere weeks of my leaving, I too had a holiday fling. When I got back to Australia, he had moved interstate but called me in a drunken stupor to protest his love for me and that 'it'll work'. I shut him down for a great litany of reasons. My Mum later revealed to me that she had been planning to send me to live with my Father in Albury (I was currently in Ballina) and work at his dental surgery, just to get me away from Chris in the hopes our relationship would petter out, so I think she was thrilled when I didn't want a thing to do with him. Her comment was that affection is just proximity. Maybe she has a point, proximity and familiarity of a relationship might have been the driving force rather than actual interest and admiration.
So I've kind of veered off on thoughtful tangent here. And I'm sure I'll keep thinking about it. So perhaps, in the vein of my confessions and convictions posts of earlier this year, maybe it's time I examined more of my habits (and of course the habits of the people in the world around me... oh random public, you all make me giggle or grrr alternately). And I might even let you all in on the process... if you're nice.
But I'm glad I'm not a smoker, a) quitting an addictive substance would be f*cking hard and b) what are you supposed to do in the extra 3 weeks between breaking a habit and making a new one?
So I walked home, and I will start riding to work occasionally and walking home more often. But in reality it'll be after this week (of dooooooooom!). But as I was walking home, I thought a lot about habits, and forming habits, breaking them and so on.
It takes something like 3 weeks to break a habit but 6 weeks to form a new one. What stupid greater power thought that would be a good idea?!?!
I think Laziness is one of my biggest habits I need to break. Funnily enough, weekends are fine. I jam pack my weekends with lots of fun things which make me love my life. I also tend to fill my weeknights with other great social things. But, when it comes to the important things, health, exercise, eating healthy, washing my clothes and doing the chores, I am super lazy and can find all sorts or distractions and excuses.
While responding to ACoopers4me's post, I said I will eventually get around to riding to work and exercising more. Mid sentence I realised what I was doing, making room for the excuse (currently stress at work). So instead I committed to walking home and made sure it happened. But that's just one instance in what will take at least 6 weeks to develop in to a regular, don't need to think about it, habit.
On my 40 min walk, I thought a lot more about broader habits. Not just physical habits that affect your health and well being. It's been an interesting couple of weeks. I hear a lot from a lot of people. I also read people's blogs and posts on facebook. I know a lot of single people - perhaps I just notice them more lately, but it makes me think about the habits we form in relationships.
I've been talking to a few guys from online dating sites as well, and particularly one tonight who has been separated from his wife for the last 3 months. They were together 9 years and married for 3 of those. Sounds like an amicable break up really. It truly sounds like they had both moved on from the relationship before it even ended. And I began to think to myself that they had stayed together out of habit rather than love and desire for a life together.
It's so easy to do, take your loved one for granted, forget to tell them you love them, forget to make the extra effort. But perhaps these things are the things that should have been made habit early in relationships. I don't want to say bad habits can't be broken, because they can. I just think there's a different dynamic to habits which are based in shared emotion.
Changing a habit about yourself, for yourself is much easier.
For example, some of you may remember that I undertook considerable effort to lose 30kg a couple of years ago. It was actually really easy. I chose to utilise Lite n Easy for my food. I started going to Pilates one a week, conveniently supplied at work. I started walking and extra 15 mins per day, making a total of 45 mins walking to and from public transport every day.
Excuse: unfortunately those good habits fell out of place when my life shifted me repeatedly and I have not rebuilt the habits in to my life. So, now I need to buck up, and break the bad lazy habit, and build exercise in to my life again.
But emotional habits might be harder to change. I'm an emotional eater, I'm not actually sure how to break that behaviour, I'll let you know if I figure it out.
I'm not in a relationship at the moment, so I guess I can only surmise, prepare and think about the healthy relationship habits I want in my life. I can't help but think I have already started adding healthy relationship habits to my life through nurturing friendships and connections both new and old. But I must also remember to take note of the things my friends do for me, or the things I see them do in their own relationships.
I think habits and observations go hand in hand. But I don't know that we ever engage both at once.
I do wish that in the past I had had the opportunity to observe and alter my own habits, and perhaps challenge the habits of those around me that weren't healthy for me. But I guess that's the point, you learn from experience. I know someone who is currently making the effort to try again on a relationship, alter and break the bad habits and nurture the good habits. I wish I'd had that opportunity, so I'm glad they are making ago of it. Conversely, i also heard a conversation by someone admitting that their marriage was over, but I don't think they'd discussed it with their partner yet, admitting having left the relationship emotionally by emerging themselves in work and distractions, yet not actually having physically left. It can't be an easy process.
But, a part of me wonders whether trying to make a relationship work when it is or has failed, is just because the habit of being in a relationship is more comfortable than stepping out in to the unknown. Hmmm, I must be channeling JD's Devil's Advocate power.
I know in the past I have gone back to relationships or even fallen in to extended liaisons out of that desire for comfort and habit of having someone there. Ultimately they either haven't worked, have been bad for me or just were never going to work. But I guess that's where observation failed me, I failed to look for warning signs, look to see if the situation was right for me, look and see if the opportunity was right for 'us'.
See, habit and observation.
I must tell you a story. I love my Mum, she hated my first boyfriend, Chris. We only dated for a month or two, when I was 18 and he was 25. This was 10 years ago and just before I was heading off to the USA for what eventually became a 5 month stint. We'd been dating a month and he knew I was heading overseas, so a few weeks before I was due to leave, he proposed to me (next to the swimming pool in his parent's trailer park no less! He didn't even get down on one knee). I don't know that I said no, but I certainly didn't accept, despite his protestations that he'll wait for me and that his parents had married young, after knowing each other only a short time. I went overseas and had a great time. He started seeing someone else while I was overseas, and admittedly, after 4 months and his contact having stopped after mere weeks of my leaving, I too had a holiday fling. When I got back to Australia, he had moved interstate but called me in a drunken stupor to protest his love for me and that 'it'll work'. I shut him down for a great litany of reasons. My Mum later revealed to me that she had been planning to send me to live with my Father in Albury (I was currently in Ballina) and work at his dental surgery, just to get me away from Chris in the hopes our relationship would petter out, so I think she was thrilled when I didn't want a thing to do with him. Her comment was that affection is just proximity. Maybe she has a point, proximity and familiarity of a relationship might have been the driving force rather than actual interest and admiration.
So I've kind of veered off on thoughtful tangent here. And I'm sure I'll keep thinking about it. So perhaps, in the vein of my confessions and convictions posts of earlier this year, maybe it's time I examined more of my habits (and of course the habits of the people in the world around me... oh random public, you all make me giggle or grrr alternately). And I might even let you all in on the process... if you're nice.
But I'm glad I'm not a smoker, a) quitting an addictive substance would be f*cking hard and b) what are you supposed to do in the extra 3 weeks between breaking a habit and making a new one?