Sometimes, when you’re in the doldrums, and everything seems to be going round in circles, the best thing you can do is get up, get out, and take yourself for a nice, long walk
At the end of a whirlwind year, I found myself terrified of 2018, and battling to scour my soul for inspiration. 15 kilograms over my ‘normal’ weight, and heavily in denial about it, even when I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, I knew I was in for a fight. Mostly with myself.
When faced with problems I can’t pinpoint the source of, I like to delve into numbers. I’m no mathematician, and I still use my calculator to figure out 4+7, but I find a strange sense of peace within numbers.
I knew I had to figure my way out of the funk, so I whipped out the numbers thing I loathe the most: my timesheets. Going over 2017’s timesheets surprised me. It had been an exceptionally busy year, but I’d dropped in productivity. A lot. It felt like the year had been filled with very long days, but in truth, I’d wasted a lot of time.
I’m the queen of easily-distracted, and a sucker for a deadline. Having always prided myself on meeting every deadline that came my way, 2017 was a year I missed some. Where I used to use pressure as the magic sauce to get things done, I was procrastinating my way towards being utterly ineffective.
That was only fuelling my anxiety. My creative abilities felt stunted and, when you work for yourself, that’s a death knell.
I had to get my head right for the new year, and quickly. I went back to the one thing that I knew served me well: the morning walk. It is an act of kindness to myself to take it, and I had neglected it for way too long, constantly making up excuses. But, come January 2018, I put those Nikes on and set off, half-annoyed with myself, and half-determined. Slowly, those little walks turned into little runs, and often a mix of the two.
Fast forward a few months, and I had set myself a small goal: enter my first race. That sounds like a simple task, but it felt gargantuan. I signed up for a 5 kilometre race, and decided to walk it, because really, I’m not here for a medal, I am here for me. To my surprise, I enjoyed it, way more than I expected to.
I enjoyed it so much, that I moaned to my life compadre and personal cheerleader, Jane, that I should’ve signed up for the 10 kilometre race. That’s what I’ve done for this month. I’ll probably regret the idea, but I’m excited!
Being more focused on being kinder to myself, and trying to stick to a regular walking schedule, paid off in strange ways. Avoiding the scale is a habit, and I had successfully avoided looking at it for most of the year.
But, just after moving into a new house and settling in, I pulled on my jeans one morning and realised I needed a new notch in my belt. Hobbling over to the scale, I was surprised to find I’d lost 12 kilograms.
That got me thinking about the numbers again, so I pulled out my timesheets for 2018 and realised my productivity level had slowly increased over the year. I was wasting less time aimlessly scrolling Twitter and getting back into my much-loved sanctum of never missing a deadline.
Comparing my progress against 2017, where I will embarrassingly admit I missed 10 deadlines, I’ve dropped the ball only once in 2018. That did teach me a great life lesson though, that people are far more understanding and human than my usually-cynical-self realises.
Now that work feels less like a chore, and I’m not so terrified of running out of ideas, life’s feeling a little easier all round. For a million and one reasons, I had to up-end almost every area of my life in 2018, but the magic trick that started it was: going for a walk.
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