The Three Pillars

In the past, blogging has given me a sort of consistency to the goals that I am working towards. When I share these ideas that I have they suddenly become more of a reality and taking them on seems to be easier in a way. I’m not sharing my thoughts and ideas to help you as a reader, if you are even reading this, but I am sharing them to help propel me on my own path.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about what exactly I want out of life, and where I would like to go next on my journey. School has been fantastic, but school on its own won’t help me get to where I would actually like to be. School is just one aspect, one pillar, of the things I am working on in my life. It’s important, but its not the only thing that will help me to be successful and happy. I stopped being as physically active when I started going to school. Physical fitness, another pillar, has typically been at the top of my priority list. Albeit for vain reasons, I have worked a lot on increasing my physical health. On accomplishing long races, or new types of tasks. However, in the last year I have fallen from that bandwagon as I started my journey into school. Finally, I see the importance of a spiritual connection with myself and the world around me. I’ve never truly put time and effort into this as it will force me to confront so many things in my head that I haven’t had the time and energy to work on.

Physical

Fitness, physical activity, running, biking, walking, lifting, the list goes on and on. When I have worked towards this in the past I have been all or nothing, but even going further than that. If there is a fitness goal I am working towards, nothing else matters. The rest of my life can wait. And so going forward I want to make sure my life consisting involves some sort of physical activity without going overboard. It’s not a race that I’m training for, it’s not a marathon run everyday, it’s not even trying to be skinny and muscular and sexy. It’s moving my body each day in a way that suits my overall health. I’m not sure what this will look like, but I am excited to write about my first weeks journey next week.

Mental

Mental. That’s right, I’m admitting to being mental right here, right now. I bet we are all a bit mental most of the time. But when I think about mental health I immediately think of alzheimer's disease, the scariest thing I can imagine happening is losing my ability to think. While I am in school it’s easy to be exercising my brain each day. But what would it look like to just be consistent with that rather than all or nothing while I am in school? Writing this blog and writing these types of posts are a good way to stretch out my brain. But I think lately I have realized how important language is to me, in my career, in my awareness of the world around me, and I think my goal for this year is to stay consistent with my language studies. French, Python, R, Java, etc… I want to continue studying and practicing these to help my brain stay active and young.

Spiritual

Honestly, I don’t know what to write here because the spiritual side of my life has been a train wreck for quite sometime. Actually, I think the only time that I have ever felt spiritually sound was while in a yoga practice, and so to tie in my three pillars the final part will be yoga. Practicing yoga has been the safest that I have felt in many years… perhaps ever? A daily yoga practice, in the evenings to shed my day and reflect back on what is important to me is the easiest way I can think of to tie these things together into a daily journey.

Tomorrow doesn’t really matter. There’s no promising that it will be here. But if I really think about it, I don’t want to spend my days without care or thought of the future. Adding these routines to my day isn’t a path to success, or a hack to a better life, it’s simply a way to spend each day investing time into the things that are most important to my overall health. If tomorrow doesn’t come, will I be happy with how I am living today. Lately the answer to that question has been no. But with minor adjustments to my direction I think that I can start to be happy with the way that I am living.