Do you remember that I was all fired up after I read Younger Next Year for Women, and that one of my new year's resolutions was to exercise six days a week?
I am finding it difficult.
I am trying to be patient with myself, because building habits takes time, but not too patient with myself, because inertia will not do me any favors in the long run.
When I was a young adult I would get really frustrated with myself about trying to build disciplined prayer habits. This is the reality: it takes practice to do hard things consistently. Probably some of the things I learned in that process will be useful here. For instance, if you start first thing in the morning, other stuff doesn't interfere. The Liturgy of the Hours is a non-negotiable part of the first 30 minutes of my day. It might not happen in the first 10 minutes, but I am definitely feeling a little itchy if I haven't started by then. I can't do aerobic exercise immediately after waking up because I have to take a beta-blocker first, but I can take the beta-blocker right away and exercise once it kicks in. This strategy is probably especially useful as the weather heats up and the cool(-ish) part of the day ends more quickly.
ALSO: breaking hard things into pieces is helpful. I almost never sit down and pray the whole rosary all at once, but I never go to sleep without finishing it either. This works for exercise too, right? Actually doing a 10-minute sun salutation is better than imagining the 45-minute yoga session I might get to later, when I feel motivated, which -- oops, maybe I'll be motivated tomorrow. (Related: another useful strategy is tying chunks of the rosary to things I must do every day, like walking to work or washing dishes. Don't know quite how to do that with exercise, though -- get a dog so I have to walk it?)
ALSO ALSO: a certain amount of box-ticking is motivating for me, like with this Bible-in-a-year plan that I'm doing for the seventh time. The timing would be just about perfect for me to sign up for an August triathlon, and then I'd have boxes to tick and an event on the calendar spurring me to tick them.
ALSO ALSO ALSO: it's mostly about showing up. In my prayer life there are transcendent moments and there are ordinary moments. You can't force transcendence; the ordinary moments outnumber the transcendent moments by a wide margin. At the same time, you (probably) don't get to transcendent if you don't show up. Maybe with exercise I need more consistency and lower expectations.
ALSO ALSO ALSO ALSO: it's generally easier to make time on weekends than on weekdays -- my weekends always include Mass and an hour in the adoration chapel; my weekdays usually do not. It might be helpful if I can reframe my thinking about weekend days as "opportunities for bonus exercise time" rather than "opportunities to sit at the dining room table and do extra puzzles in between catching up on stuff around the house."
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