Do any of you make personal goals for yourself?
I am making some goals for myself. I wrote them on my blog, but I will just copy and paste here.
Non-frat: no tv/movies, less internet (that means this forum too), less phone, no non-organic foods. More yoga, meditation, time spent outdoors, reading, writing, practicing a new language, organic foods, healthy shakes and salads.
FRAT
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Goals:
So I haven’t done my ‘goals of the week’ for a couple of weeks. To be honest, I have grown a bit tired of them. I seemed to have just kept repeating similar goals each week anyway. I have also found that a week is too easy, even for goals that are new to me.
I have given some thought over the last couple of weeks about the idea of having goals, and why I like having them.
I think that I enjoy having structure. While I was training and competing my life was insanely structured. I knew all of my workouts, I knew my eating habits, I knew what I was and wasn’t going to be doing in a day, evening, night and weekend.
Now I have much more freedom in a day to day sense, as well as a very general sense. The freedom is great, but I do find that I miss having a bit of structure in my day to day living. I enjoy having a routine to act as a scaffold for how my days are structured.
I think I have a semi-rough idea of what I want in my day to day routines, and so I thought that I would make myself a set of goals to do for one month. I think that one month of consistently doing something is a good way to cement that thing into a routine.
Here are some of the things that I plan and hope to maintain for the next month (starting tomorrow, August 6th):
Yoga
yoga-alliance
I have joined a great Yoga studio that I bike to a few times a week. I love it. I don’t mind paying for it, as it is something that a I really enjoy and enjoy supporting. It has value.
For yoga, I want to go every weekday, as early as possible. That means some days going at 6am and some days at 10 or noon. My goal for yoga is to have it be something that I perform every morning, preferably as early as possible.
Meditation
meditate
Know thyself. This is one of the greatest and most important things one can do. How can someone know what they want, whether it is from other people in their lives, from their government, from a career, or from a meal, unless they first know who they themselves are? Or what a person is? What it is that you identify as, and why that is?
Meditation, for me, is about connecting with reality and with the self, essentially, with true nature or essence of what is. It is amazing just how deep the rabbit hole goes when you start to investigate into these things. It also connects me to my study of philosophy, and helps me ground myself and the things I read and experience into some sort of basis for meaning.
It represents taking a break from being in the world and taking the time to find the answer to any question I may have, or to seek a connection with myself. These are things that facebook and technologies can’t speak of.
For meditation, I want to meditate once daily, for a minimum of 20 minutes. Like yoga, I want to meditate as early in the day as possible, preferably alone without any distractions.
Reading and Writing
I love reading. Next to having a human conversation, reading is my favorite form of communication or means to take in information. Unlike television or audiobooks, reading is much easier to pause, reflect, re-evaluate, re-read, think some more, then continue. Second only to conversations, it is the best way to take in information as it allows you the ability to evaluate the information most thoroughly, before committing it to your consciousness. The ability to do that to a news broadcast, comparatively, sucks.
I love writing. In school and university I had labelled myself a ‘scientist’, and never enjoyed writing assignments or overly creative activities. Somewhere along the way I have recently started to really enjoy writing. Whether it is on this site, or creative writing I do offline, I find it really enjoyable. It has a quality that I value, and is also great stimulation for the mind.
For reading and writing, I hope to make this part of my daily activities by reading and/or writing for a minimum of two hours a day.
Learning a language
I started to use a great FREE program that can be downloaded called Anki. It is a flashcard system that learns which words you acquire to your vocabulary and which you have difficulty with, and the frequency of the words/flashcards presented to you reflects that.
I have chosen french as the first language to try and become fluent in as I have the greatest head start in it. Being Canadian it seems the most practical. I think learning other languages can help broaden your horizons and opportunities, it helps your creativity, it can alter the way you think and perceive your world (based purely on the structure of language itself), and of course offers great mental stimulation.
For learning a language, I plan to simply use the anki decks once a day. This can last anywhere from 15-30 minutes.
Organic food only
This will be a fairly easy one for me, but will require some self-control. Generally, I only eat organic food. But there are many instances that I don’t: when I am at someone else’s house and am served food, if going to a restaurant, eating cheese (hard to find organic cheese), and of course when I eat all the left-over and scraps of cake that my gf provides me.
I am going to do my best in eating organic only. This means bringing my own food to other peoples’ homes (and possibly offending them), no more eating out shawarma, and probably means reducing the amount of cheese I eat as it is harder to find organic cheese, and when you do it is quite expensive.
Junk food restriction
I have become relaxed in the last few weeks over eating junk food, specifically sweets. I used to be able to have a box of organic “oreo” cookies in the house and open the cabinet without taking one, or I was able to take ‘just’ one. Now, the purchase of said cookies results in me eating them all in one sitting, no problem!
I don’t mind snacking though. For example, I have no problem eating things like hummus, guacamole, and greek yogurt as dips, but the question will be what will the dipping agent be. I usually eat blue corn chips, but unless I can find some that are baked and not fried, perhaps pita bread and veggies will be the best bet.
This will be a tough one at first, I think. I love my sweets. But I will try and stay focused by remember a time several months ago when I had absolutely no desire to eat any sort of sugary or sweet desert.
Hardcore vegetable shake every day
This one is easy. I have an amazingly healthy veggie-fruit-seed-herb-root-shake every weekday, but weekends I tend to be to busy. I want to keep it consistent and make sure to have these shakes even on the weekends.
Eat Salads
I used to eat salads fairly often. I have eaten some really really amazingly awesome salads. Salads that I find to be so delicious, I crave them. Salads can be incredibly tasty while still being completely healthy. The biggest hurdle for eating these salads is the prep time. It is easy when someone else has made one for you, but if you have to do it all yourself, it can limit your salad intake.
I plan to man up and make a salad everyday for myself. I want to research and attempt some different salads, and hopefully find a couple that become part of my normal eating habits.
I think the key to overcoming the salad preparation problem is the viewpoint that is taken. Rather than looking at preparing salads as something that is negative and something that one ‘has’ to do, as if it is a chore and an obstacle to getting to the healthy and yummy salad, I am going to change my perception and view it as an opportunity to learn new recipes, to get to work with my hands (which is something that I enjoy), and to engross myself in the process of eating.
(which, when I think about it, seems dysfunctional. Imagine an animal in the wild that enjoyed eating but found the process of acquiring food to be too annoying to take part. This would surely make for an unnatural animal and one that wouldn’t survive long. Yet humans, due to our abundance in wealth, options and luxuries, are able to circumvent this completely inherent and natural process of staying alive. With the absence of a pressure to maintain the need to prepare food (we see examples of this from fastfood, microwavable foods, oven heated foods, pre-made foods in the form of even bread itself) we change from other wild animals in our disposition towards how we value healthy food, and our willingness to acquire it. Rather than eating fresh foods that still contain vitality (literally that were just alive), it is easier to buy something pre-made that is less fresh, of less vitality (more dead and inert) and more chemically altered. This would be like a lion refusing to take down a gazelle because it is too much work, and would rather find one already dead and decomposed to eat.)
No TV or movies
For the month I want to rid myself of movies and tv. I will allow for one exception, and possibly a second. The first is educational. Not edutainment, like a stupid documentary such as ‘supersize me’, but something that is just educational. I suppose that is a relative and subjective distinction, but that should be easy for me to maintain.
The second exception I am considering is to allow myself to watch Star Trek: the next generation. I enjoy it because each episode involves one or more ethical conundrums. These issues have to be dealt with in one way or another, and the reasoning and valuations presented are quite interesting. Despite this, though, I see things in even star trek that I don’t enjoy.
The reason behind this, I am an advocate of, is that entertainment must be tightly self-regulated and one must strongly guard oneself against entertainment. Plato has argued it, and Seneca warned us against it. I speak of it here, please read.
So I feel that it isn’t even enough to be aware of unwanted things (morals and systems of ethics) entering our mind. To say “it’s ok to watch this because I know it isn’t real and people shouldn’t act this way” still doesn’t prevent the damage. The only proper course of action is to prevent unwanted ‘things’ from entering ones’ perceptions and mind.
Not just this, but it is easy to let ‘watching tv/movies’ to be the default ‘relaxing’ setting at home. Come home, tired and just want to sit down and relax, that means being passive and just watch stuff. I think that I probably watch about 1-1.5 hours of tv a night, and I would prefer to eliminate that. That is upwards to 30-45 hours a month, which is almost two FULL DAYS, each month, dedicated to sitting in front of a screen and passively receiving programming. There are many reasons why I find this unhealthy, but the first thing to come to mind is the time spent/lost watching the tv that could be spent doing something of higher quality. Sitting and talking, playing a board game, reading, taking a nice long walk, spending time outdoors, sharing stories, etc.
No TV or movies for a month, unless it is purely educational and doesn’t contain any ‘sexy spin’. I think I will allow an episode of star trek once or twice a week as a treat, but maybe not even then.
Spend more time outside
I love taking my dog for nice walks outside, especially in the nice weather. I enjoy taking walks at night with my dog and my gf to the grocery store to pick up an item or two. It gives us a chance to do some light exercise, to get our blood flowing (which oppositely, sitting, is incredibly unhealthy as it increases inflammation), we can breath in fresh air, give our dog a chance to exercise, to be trained and exercise that ‘pack’ mentality, and of course allows my gf and I to spend some quality time together talking about anything and everything.
So, I would love to spend more time going for walks, whether it is for food or just for the fun of it. There doesn’t really need to be an objective.
Secondly, I would like to spend more time outdoors at night. There is always something great and wonderful about looking up at a sky full of stars at night. It never gets old. Imagine that humans for thousands (10′s, 100′s, 1000′s) of years would experience the stars every night of their lives. Imagine how connected they must have felt to the universe and to nature. I think that there is something special and valuable in that.
I want to take an extra walk outside each day or night, and spend at least 10 minutes each night to simply enjoy and appreciate the stars, or simply use them as a setting to think about anything that I wish to think about.
Less phone, less internet
I want to limit my phone and internet usage. The insane thing is, I literally don’t know how. This, in itself, is enough for me to want to move towards a less electronically dependent lifestyle. The simple reality that I don’t really know how to live without my phone or internet strikes me as a warning sign, like something isn’t right here.
When I express the idea that I don’t want to have a smartphone (read: computer that does everything and acts as an extended appendage of my body) or possibly even a cellphone (just have a home phone) anymore, I am met with scoffs and comments like “how? what are you going to do? how will you know stuff? how will you talk to people?”
This bothers me. It bothers me because probably my generation and all subsequent generations are so reliant on technology that we can’t understand how to live and function without them. This is truly a sign of dependence. Technology is shifting from ‘making our lives better and easier’ to ‘necessary for our lives’, or ‘making or lives(period).’
So how am I going to do this? I use the internet for news, for writing my blog, for communicating to specific people through email, for daydreaming about certain things (travel, going to school, house building, etc), and for answering general question I might have.
I use my phone for music, to listen to audio books, for internet, forums, email and the news. Oh, hahaha how funny! I honestly forgot that I use my phone as a phone and to text. How telling!
I think for my phone I will use it purely as a phone (text and calls), and for music/audiobooks. I think that I will completely limit all internet usage (web browers, twitter, internet forums, etc) except for emails. So, I will use my phone for texting, phone calls, music/audiobooks and for emails.
This will also be great for me as I won’t require my phone to be ‘on me’ as often. I pretty much go on my phone after waking up, and before bed. These are bad habits in my opinion, and I will be glad to see them gone.
As for the internet in general (ie. at my house on my laptop), I will use it solely for educational purposes, necessity (such as if I want to look up the bus schedule, look up the yoga schedule hours, look up the phone number of a business, etc), and a bit of news/forums. I will limit this internet activity to a total of 45 minutes a day. For writing on my blog, I will just write in MS word, then copy and paste onto the blog. This means less pictures and videos and links to attach and embed into my blog posts, and more text and just my own thoughts.
Of course, I work and my work does require some internetting. So while at work I will do the required internetting that the work requires of me, but that is all. I can’t limit that internet usage.
Overall
So, quite generally, I plan to free up my time by removing tv/movies from the equation. I will free up more time by reducing the amount of time I spend using my phone and on the internet.
With this free time I will allow myself to do yoga, meditate, read, write and practice french daily. I will take the time to eat healthier and prepare meals that might be seen as cumbersome to prepare, such as salads. I will also spend more time outdoors.