sherrygym

[sherrygym]

Progress, at least some!

It feels good to do something that you used to think you WILL do some day. I have finally started to maintain a tracker to track some of things that I always wanted to track to see how I was doing over time. It wasn't that I was doing those things earlier when I was not tracking them. I simply kept postponing telling myself that I will do them when I start tracking them. This meant that I did nothing!

But a start has finally been made. I have started a tracker in the form of a google spreadsheet (until I can find an elegant tracking solution or build one). It's just been 2 days but it feels good since I look forward to updating it.

I also had this goal of starting meditation. Yesterday when I wrote the blog entry, I hadn't done it but after writing it and marking a negative response in the tracker, I asked myself why not right now. So I spent a few minutes just closing my eyes and letting my mind wander. It was a good experience. My initial thought about meditation was that while meditating one should try and avoid thinking too much and just concentrate on one particular thing. But I later learnt that thinking about things while meditating is a natural process and should be accepted as such. Any thoughts that come to mind should be let loose thereby ultimately letting them just flow through. The mind keeps freely wandering from one thing to another. So if one is meditating and is not able to concentrate, it's totally fine. That's how it is meant to be. May be down the line I will have enough control over my thoughts and emotions that I can direct them the way I want to. Now since I meditated yesterday and tracked a positive response for it in my tracker, I couldn't let the chain break and did another session today for a few minutes. So starting is probably the toughest part. Once that is out of the way, the motivation comes on its own probably to not let yourself down once more. It's possible that it may fade away down the line but I am hoping that the excitement of keeping the tracker updated and the disappointment of marking a negative response will probably keep me going. Or may be the initial motivation will make way for this to become a habit for good. Will have to see.

I was not planning on writing a blog entry today since I did one yesterday and thought it could wait. But then I thought why not. I have made some, though little, progress and I should better put it down in the blog. Another motivating factor was to learn about this person who has been writing a blog entry everyday and that too since September 2003. That is one BIG achievement! I followed this person's blog for a few months last year but then didn't continue for some reason. All that while I never realized that he wrote every day. It was only today that I learnt it. It was amazing to just think about it.

Signing off with some progress on the goals and hoping to continue the streak.

[sherrygym]

Restart!

The last time I wrote, I had set some small goals for myself that I hoped to achieve as I embarked on a journey of bringing about some changes in my life. Unfortunately, I have not been persistent enough to even start with them. I sort of forced myself to write this entry so that I can at least tick one item off of that list which was to write 2 blog entries per week. Actually I was able to write only one entry last week so technically I have not even done one thing.

My wife read through the first entry and was encouraging in her response although she must be seeing it play over once again. She probably thinks I'm having another bout of making a positive change in my life which will only end up in a blog post and will never materialize into anything.

Last year I started learning the blogging platform Octopress. I was going through a similar phase then where I had some ideas and wanted to learn something new but things were just not translating into action. And then I came across Octopress and POOF! It looked simple enough to learn and non-trivial enough to invest time in. I had this idea of a blog and Octopress looked like a great way to bring it to life. I just started going through the documentation and started creating it. I think I had the blog live in a week's time and started sharing it with some friends to get initial feedback.

To be honest, I had some high expectations for a simple blog and since the feedback over the next few weeks was lukewarm, I was a little discouraged. I knew at the back of my mind that success isn't instant and I had to be persistent and just keep coming out with new content but I guess it's easier said than done the first time you do something. Anyways, I finally had my mind grounded and I just started updating the blog without any expectations whatsoever. Then my wife learnt the process of updating the blog and she started taking care of it. Around 4 months after I started the blog, we just stopped updating it. We were not creating content on our own. It was a blog in the entertainment industry which required sourcing information from at least 7-8 sources. So it wasn't a very easy task. With a toddler at home, I guess we couldn't just juggle multiple things and the blog took a back seat almost forever.

The reason I mention this now is because my wife and I plan to start posting new content on that blog. The reason we stopped updating it in the first place is still there and more so now since we have a one month old as well but we felt that we can go back to it and may be do 1 entry every week or two instead of having it lie dormant altogether.

Coming back to the other two things that I was planning to do - I haven't started mediating yet but surely will. As for tracking, I was looking to see if there are any solutions out there but I couldn't find anything. That may be a reason to build one on my own. I am thinking through it and will probably post about it the next time.

[sherrygym]

New Beginnings

I guess everybody has those moments when they are just thinking about doing something, small or big but meaningful, some day. There's a new idea coming up almost everyday. Some stick around for a while and some just disappear as fast they appeared. We sometimes think through some of those ideas a lot hoping and feeling that some of them, if not all, will become reality one day. We think about all the possibilities and use cases around them. And then? Nothing happens. Reality sets in. Bills pile up, people get sick, relationships strain or most of the time we just get lazy and the idea is simply put aside probably to be never thought of again. Some call it procrastination and some the reality of life. Some make peace with the fact that they have abandoned something that they thought was their life's purpose and for others the guilt of being a loser just keeps lingering at the back of the mind with a slight hope that they will some day come back to it.

And then there are people who, after they have conceded to this way of life, are woken up from their slumber by a shock or a life changing event for the worse - Losing a job, humiliation by loved ones or society as a whole for being nobody, being diagnosed with a life threatening disease or just realizing out of the blue that there isn't much time left to make dreams reality. And then driven by new found passion, or fear, they go onto do things that they always wanted to do.

If you think about it this is a little strange. Ideally, we should be doing things that we'll love to do when everything's going well for us and we are healthy but instead we wait for things to take an ugly turn before we embark on the journeys which we always wanted to be a part of. I guess that's how we are wired.

I am trying to start afresh finally hoping to give wings to some of the small things that I've always wanted to do. There are big ones too but those shall come later when I have made sure that this is not, once again, one of those phases where I feel like bringing about a change in my life only to let it die a slow death.

To hold myself accountable, I am starting this blog to list down what I want to do, how I am doing and document my thought process along the way. Writing this blog itself is something that I have been thinking for a long time. Writing helps evolve one's thinking and the ability to articulate those thoughts well. I have tried maintaining a blog on a couple of occasions earlier but things fell through the cracks. But this time I am coming back with a strong resolve.

Write at least 2 blog entries each week.

Maintain a daily tracker for some of the things that I don't do right. e.g. On some days, I lose my patience and easily get angry because of petty things. I don't feel comfortable listing all of them here but I intend on tracking them.

Start meditation - Meditate at least 3 times each week for 2 minutes. And then after a few weeks, look to either increase the frequency or the duration.

That's more than enough for now. There's some part in me telling me that I will not be able to sustain my current thought process and do these things but I guess that'll always be the case and I will have to take it one day at a time and prove that part of me wrong.