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    • Raising the Average

      “If you have the aspiration of kicking ass when you’re 85, you can’t afford to be average when you’re 50.” — Peter Attia

      A while back I committed to doing a fundraiser to fund research grants for children’s cancer. I more than doubled the amount of miles I would do compared to last year, when I walked 100% of the miles. The logic was that by combining walking with higher return on time investment workouts like rowing and cycling I should be able to do much more than I did simply walking. But there was a secondary motivation for ramping up the mileage: habit reformation. I’d simply gotten out of the habit of doing some workouts I love to do but aren’t as easy as simply walking. But we’re in it for the long haul, aren’t we?

      We’re all going to decline both physically and mentally over time. I’ve seen too many people I know slide in one or both ways over the last few years, and it’s a reminder that time is coming for us too. If the goal is to live a vibrant, healthy life for as long as possible before we decline, like Attia’s ass-kicking 85 year-old, then we’d best build a strong foundation now, whatever age we’re currently at. A walk is better than sitting, but a diverse fitness routine is better still. Queue the fundraiser as catalyst for lifestyle change.

      Time is the enemy of all of us. If we’re going to be productive in ways other than exercise, we can’t afford the time to be working out constantly. At least that’s what that other voice keeps telling us when we’re deciding between working out or making coffee first thing in the morning. We can do it tomorrow is the biggest lie we tell ourselves. The reality is that we get more energy when we move more, which makes us feel more productive than we’d have been otherwise. It’s 8 AM and I’ve completed a 13 mile ride, a swim, showered and fed the pup and I’m about to click publish on this blog post. We nurture and increase possibility in doing more with the time we have.

      Now extend that lifestyle out to the end of our days. Imagine what else if possible if we simply use our available time in more productive and exhilarating ways. A bit of ass-kicking today can build a future well above the average.

    • Savor the Circle

      “Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.” ― Anton Chekhov, The Portable Chekhov

      I hit the 20 mile mark yesterday in combined mileage between cycling and walking. This may not seem all that impressive, but it was a busy and hot day and that milestone was very much in doubt for much of the day. I finished just after 10 PM, when I’m usually in bed reading. To celebrate I took a late night solo swim—just me and the stars and satellites in a dark pool of water on the edge of the woods. And I felt completely alive and present floating there.

      The older I get the less I seek meaning in everything I do. I’m simply enjoying it all. Washing dishes never felt so fulfilling. Dead-heading the flowers is meditative. Cleaning up after the pets? Not so delightful, but not something I avoid or resent as I’m doing it. It’s just part of the deal. Life is a series of chores and commitments we make to each other before we carve out a bit of time for ourselves to savor the circle we’ve surrounded ourselves with.

      The scale is telling me that I’m roughly the same character I was a month ago, but what does a scale know? I’m more fit, more active, seeing more and feeling the momentum of consistency. We know when we’re fully alive and when we’re fooling ourselves. Activity pays dividends beyond numbers on a scale.

      These are days we’ll remember. At least they will be if we place ourselves squarely in the moment and fill each with things that make us feel vital and healthy. As we move into the height of summer, what will we take from this time? The satisfying snip of a spent bloom? The smell of tomato vines and twine? Light shining in north-facing windows that rarely catch such beams but for the longest days of the year? Or bubbles running up your back as you rise to meet the July sky? The answer is to delight in it all.

    • A Day to Remember

      “I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

      Yesterday was surely a day to remember. Yes, there was that assassination attempt on a Presidential candidate (horrific, not shocking given the divisive climate), but honestly I didn’t even know about that until hours later. World-changing events happen whether we’re watching it unfold or not. The question is, what are we doing to create a positive ripple in our own pond? For me I’ll remember the day we brought our whole family together in one place after too long apart for a day of celebration.

      I’ll always remember January 6th, October 7th and September 11th for the events that unfolded on those days, just as we come to associate place names with other world-changing events: Tiananmen Square, the Pulse Nightclub, Pearl Harbor and on and on. Life on this pale blue planet is complex and often tragic (none of us gets out alive, after all), but we may control how we react to it, and mitigate the impact of some world events with our lifestyle choices. To be more antifragile should be a goal for each of us.

      The seismic political, social and environmental events unfolding in our world will always be there and can’t be ignored, but we may choose to stay far away the epicenter and focus instead on building something beautiful. We may be insular without being ignorant. The ripples will reach us as they always do in such events, but when we put ourselves to higher ground we aren’t completely washed over when black swan events happen.

      So what will we remember most today? It ought to be something deeply meaningful that we may influence in our own lives, not something out of our control. Make it a day to remember for all the right reasons. Our own positive ripple may counter the negative splash someone else is making.

    • Pressing the Essence

      “I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.” — Mary Oliver, Pen and Paper and a Breath of Air

      Grabbing the moment was the goal well before this blog began, but the writing emphatically reminds me to seize the bloody day already. Some hours are seized, others are burned frivolously and quickly forgotten like all the rest of our lost time. We ought to remind ourselves to look for the essence in every hour and give it our full attention before it slips away to the infinite.

      Paying attention helps. What are we experiencing right now? Where will it lead us next? How can we put an exclamation point on this moment? This level of curiosity and focus wrings joie de vivre out of ordinary. Whoever we will become surely begins right here and now, wherever we find ourselves. We may write a hell of a story launched from this hour or give it to the average like all the rest, the choice is ours. It always begins with where we focus our attention.

      Perhaps that’s my why for this blog. The thing that keeps it going instead of all the other things I might do instead of this with this particular hour. Then again, maybe there’s something more hiding just below the surface in this hour that is even more essential for you and I to discover. We won’t know if we don’t seek it out.

    • Before the Noise

      Well, those drifters days are past me now
      I’ve got so much more to think about
      Deadlines and commitments
      What to leave in
      What to leave out
      — Bob Seger, Against the Wind

      Count me in as a proponent of productive mornings. I get far more done in the first three hours of the day than I do the rest of the day. We all have our time of peak energy and focus, and for me it’s between the moment I wake up and the moment the world throws its first curveball my way. Every day offers new twists and turns, and all we can truly count on is that short amount of time that is ours before the noise.

      Before is the trick, I think. Before everyone else’s agenda becomes ours. Before the distraction machine between our ears has robbed us of our focus and mental energy to do anything of consequence this day. Before is everything for the early bird.

      This post is out late because I prioritized a long mileage workout over writing. Normally I do it the other way around, but alas, the workouts don’t always survive intact after the noise. With deadlines and commitments, we’re always weighing what to leave in and what to leave out in our lives. A song like Against the Wind is more meaningful with a few miles on the soul than it was as a kid.

      Priorities change as we do. And we aren’t drifting at this point in our lives, are we? No, we’re living with purpose and trying to fit as much in as a day will give us. The lesson always seems to come back to starting early and not beating ourselves up for leaving a few things out.

    • Choices and Character

      “The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.” ― Heraclitus

      “Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.” — Heraclitus

      A good day to double down on the Heraclitus quotes. It’s raining out, the planned heavy mileage morning washed aside in a wave of rain water and that extra mai tai last night. A setback is not a trend, but it can be the start of one if we let it go unchecked. The influence of friends and circumstance can sway us from our key objectives if we don’t stay focused on who we are meant to be.

      This is where that protracted and patient effort comes into play. What is our system for resetting ourselves on the task at hand? Systems are our big picture, identity-based habits are the daily reckoning. We are what we repeatedly do, nothing more and nothing less. If those systems and habits are negative, we’ll repeat the same mistakes over and over, if they’re positive and productive, we’ll quickly right the ship and get back on course.

      The best way I’ve found to stay on course for the long haul is to ask myself every morning, who is the character I wish to become? Which leads to the secondary question, what do I need to do today to lead me there? And then it’s simply doing it. Diversions off the path happen to all of us in our long march to what’s next, that doesn’t make it who we are or will become so long as we steer our choices back to character.

    • Building Blocks

      “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.” ― Jim Henson

      I’m thinking a lot about blocks lately. Probably because I’ve encountered a few more than usual recently in my life. Nothing extraordinary, just life’s jumble of obstacles stacking up between where I am and where I’d like to be. Still, they’re clearly blocks to be dealt with.

      Writer’s block doesn’t just get in the way of writers and poets, it gets in the way of anyone trying to break away from the path more traveled on. Life can be a trap, setting us in the role we’ve become accustomed to and not letting us go off and do the crazy things we dreamed once of doing. At least that’s the way the block forms in our mind. The trick is to see this for what it is and just keep on writing the chapter we want for ourselves despite that internal dialogue.

      Blocks are best used as sprinters use them—as something solid from which to launch ourselves into full speed without slipping backwards. A sprinter has no momentum yet, and the block becomes a fixed point from which to begin again. Reinventing the blocks in our life to become something useful seems a better way to live a creative life. Thinking of blocks as something to launch from, or something to build upon, transforms the block from a barrier to our success to a key element of it.

      The thing is, we must continue to be provocative in our lives. Push boundaries beyond comfortable and see what a bit of discomfort does for our story. Every hero’s journey has blocks along the way, and so too must our journey. Each offers something to build on to reach our happily ever after.

    • Beyond the News

      “News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.” — Evelyn Waugh

      I seem to have the same discussion about the news over and over again. Most everyone is unhappy with the state of it, hates that it’s always bad and that the quality of reporting has slipped to levels of mediocrity not seen in years. And yet people still watch it.

      Like most people I stopped reading the newspaper first, favoring online for the more current news. The problem with online breaking news was that you lose insight when everything is so breathlessly now. Breaking news is akin to looking at the accident on the other side of the highway as you crawl past it. You can ascertain pretty quickly that it’s some level of bad and move on, or you can linger with it longer than you should and ruin the journey for all who follow you.

      News channels even hate themselves. They try to get people to watch with best ice cream in town stories or feel good pet rescue stories, but then they flip right back to the horror du jour. In Boston people spent hours and hours of their lives debating the guilt or innocence of a woman accused of killing her significant other. If you aren’t in the families of the two parties or aren’t part of the jury, what has that got to do with any of us?

      I can be aware of the suffering in the world without spending my time locked to yet another story about it. Call me blissfully ignorant if you will, but I could care less about any of that beyond a high level awareness of what may impact me if I don’t act on it. The news to me revolves around whether to bring the umbrella, drive a different route to my appointment, change my passwords immediately and occasionally to be on the lookout, otherwise I get on with my day. It’s okay to be aware, but we must remember to live ourselves that we may use our time productively and purposefully. To live beyond the news is to step closer to our potential.

    • Life’s Good Runs

      “Life is like skiing. Just like skiing, the goal is not to get to the bottom of the hill. It’s to have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets.” — Seth Godin

      We each go through distinct seasons in our lives, not just age-based but in what we are focused on. We look back on them fondly or maybe not so fondly, but we can see exactly who we were at the time and know it brought us to who we are today. School days, sports played, people encountered and cherished for awhile, books read and discussed, career rungs climbed, places visited that seep into our souls—these are all good runs that we remember for the rest of our days. A lifetime may itself be a good run, made up of a series of other runs played by the distinct characters we were at the time.

      I still identify as a rower even though my rowing days on water are far in my past. Millions of meters on a machine in my basement aren’t quite the same, but the feeling of the catch made perfectly resonates across time and place. How many great catches did I have? Who’s to say but we know one when we feel it. Either way, that stroke ends and we recover for the next. Like skiing and life phases the goal is to put together as many good ones as you can in the time allotted.

      At the moment, I’m on quite a run of blog posts, but just last week I was wondering if this particular run was over for me. Not quite yet, but we’ll see how life unfolds. We each have good days and bad days, and with each morning a chance to begin anew. There’s a certain thrill in publishing something just when I thought I’d had enough to say and found some new plot twist to unpack.

      We recognize when we’re in the midst of a good run, just as we feel when a good run is ending. We’ll look with trepidation at the next run wondering whether we’ll enjoy that part of the ride, knowing that there are some things we most definitely won’t enjoy at all. We can’t rush through the bad parts to get to the good parts to come any more than we can hold on to the good parts forever. Life unfolds and we adapt to it and grow. What comes next is important too, but let’s not forget the thrill of the run we’re currently on.

    • To Live Is to Fly

      To live is to fly low and high
      so shake the dust off of your wings
      and the sleep out of your eyes
      — Cowboy Junkies, To Live Is to Fly

      I think that maybe stagnation is our greatest adversary. It kills any momentum in our lives and hastens our demise. We must move while we can. Stillness will claim us one day soon, but not just yet.

      Yes, I think that movement is the key. We must keep moving to fully live. Even trees, forever rooted to place, are constantly reaching up and outward to embrace the light, and dance in the breeze together. So it is with us, even when rooted, we must keep moving.

      Yesterday I rolled out the bicycle for a long ride along a rail trail. Cycling is the low form of flying, but a delightful way to traverse time and place. I wondered, why don’t I ride more often? No answer was apparent, just a resolution to take flight again soon. Life is a series of self-discoveries with the occasional memory jog reminding us that there are moments from our past worthy of a moment of reacquaintance. A bicycle deserves a better fate than to hang forever in a garage gathering dust. So too do we.

      What else is gathering dust, awaiting our return? Hiking boots? Books? Passports? First drafts? What might we put into motion again, that it may take off full of life? We must shake the dust off and flap these wings. To live is to fly, low and high.