Best of Luck Climbing Out of your Rut in 2018
A tough year is behind us and now a New Year challenges us to make resolutions for better tomorrows. The problem is that resolutions are only kept by an estimated 8% of the population. That leaves the rest of us to be filled with guilt and regret from about February through December. Then the cycle starts all over again. If you hate having new reasons to feel like a loser, you also hate New Year’s Resolutions.
The Rut is Deeper
The problem with resolutions is a matter of ratio. The depth of the rut we live in is usually must deeper than the amount of motivation we have to get ourselves out. Putting a whole new set of goals into practice requires the kind of resolve that a young, promising football player has to continue working toward a career with the NFL. Wait! Back up! Even that analogy doesn’t work anymore, since the NFL has been gradually losing more of its audience over politics, which divides the country approximately in half. Future prospects for a poor kid to be a rich athlete seem to be diminishing.
A better way to put it is that it’s hard to get motivated to climb out of a rut when the things that make the rut bearable are the things you’re giving up.
Change is Hard
There’s nothing easy about making huge changes, especially when those changes cause discomfort. Take weight loss, for instance. It is entirely possible to retrain our bodies to crave good things instead of bad things. But once you’re already addicted to sugar, which they say has a pull as strong as heroin, getting free feels as difficult as having to saw off a body part for survival, like in Saw.
Exercise can become a habit we crave, but if we’ve been living like a couch potato, making the change is very painful. It takes a lot of resolve to intentionally subject yourself to the excruciating process of putting muscles back to work. Sure, there are tremendous awards on the other side of the process of change. But we’re like Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away. To get beyond the breakers around our island of comfort, we need something like the torn off section of a port-a-potty, to give us wings. Ironically, there’s a drink for that, but it supposedly does a lot to wreck our health, which in a way defeats the purpose of exercise.
Find Your Personal Wind
As we face the coming year with the indescribable sense of hope that a new beginning provides, may we each find our own personal version of a port-a-potty wall. It will be necessary to catch some kind of wind, to get us where we dream of going.
