I just set 30m on the timer and started writing…
Two months ago, I moved out of my parent’s place for the first time to drive across the country by myself to “find my fortune.”
I just turned eighteen, and I’m in my first weird slump since moving out. I’d been preparing for the time when I’d moved out for many years now, and for the most part, it’s been all that I’ve expected it would be. Finding a place to rent, finding the means for transportation, finding a good Church, finding good friends and work was significantly more straightforward than I anticipated.
What I wasn’t expecting was how significantly those I spent the most amount of time with would immediately affect my own motivation and actions.
Growing up, my parents built a business (hardlotion.com) from the ground up, and having nine kids, meant that much of our earlier years were spent in the company preparing products for shipment and fulfilling orders. Because of this, there was always an atmosphere of entrepreneurship and thinking outside the box in the family. Which set us apart from many other families we knew, and many were and are surprised with our upbringing.
Over the years, greatly in part to my parents for instilling a sense of adventure and excitement around building our own futures and not going the traditional path; I’ve been writing and reading very consistently and built it into a habit which I attribute the majority of where I’ve gotten to today and the trajectory to which I am headed.
That all changed as soon as I moved out. Before, I would have pretty clean and consistent routines and habits that were effortless to maintain and grow.
However, since getting out on my own, I did not consider how significant of an impact my parents and even siblings had on my consistency. It was suddenly much harder to keep to a strict time of when I would go to bed, what I ate, and even my reading and writing.
Moving across the country into an environment in which I knew almost no one. Trying to figure out all the logistics of getting an apartment when the government doesn’t see me as a real human (except interestingly when it comes to taxes) and finding enough work to not have to get a normal job upon my arrival was something I’d never experienced (nor did I know anyone that had done it before). It was a bit scary in some senses, but my sense of adventure and excitement and faith that this was the direction the Lord had for me well overshadowed any significant doubts I had.
The trouble was, that since I didn’t know anyone, and I had to discover so many new things on my own for the first time - my internal sense of comfort was completely reset. There was, and still is this weird sense of trust I am living in right now that has actually kept me really calm and what was left of my shyness seems to have gone away. This all sounds great, however, since my comfort compass was reset, I now found it really difficult to be as strict with my dieting habits, when I went to bed, reading, and writing.
I’m ashamed to say that the blog I was so proud to keep very updated, hasn’t had a post in several months.
It got to the point where my routines before I left home were so extensive and set, that to any outsider, it might seem outrageous to start up from scratch. Basically, I had built my own systems and quality meters around my habits and routines that would be difficult to fulfill without a lot of work.
This meant that as my work and social life started to grow, I didn’t feel I had the time to keep up with my former good and healthy habits as I saw them as huge time consumers or mountains I wouldn’t see the benefit from climbing until much later and so wouldn’t begin the climb.
Recently, I got a little fed up with my own attitude and how much time I am starting to spend on social media mindlessly browsing videos and images that I decided to just “do one small thing” which in this case was writing a blog post.
Immediately in my mind, I started getting thoughts of “but what do you write about” “you don’t have the time” and “it’s not going to be worth the effort.” Some of which were legitimate, but I had to start somewhere, and even if I produced two sentences, that was better than nothing.
So I wrote on my to-do for the day “write a blog post in under 30 minutes” without any other rules. It could be whatever I wanted it to be about, I just had to do it in an uninterrupted 30 minute time block.
I’ve got 65s left on the timer and just doing a quick once over before hitting publish.
Hopefully more to come,
-Gideon