Challenge Four: Day Thirty-Three

Breakfast: 9am
46oz. Water

Mid-Morning: 11am
46oz. Water

Lunch: 3pm
1 Butterfinger Visalus Shake

Mid-Afternoon: 5pm
1 Chicken Breast (w/Pepper)
16oz. V8 (Low Sodium, Spicy Hot)
46oz. Water

Evening: 9pm
1 Double Butterfinger Visalus Shake

State of Being:

You know why it would actually be a really, really bad thing to live forever?

Well, there are several reasons, now that I think of it. But, the one that’s been very prominently on my mind lately is the difference, in the human mind, between the long- and short-term perceptions of the passage of time.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, I can point to some specific examples of this that everyone has encountered at various points in their lives.

Summer vacation arrives. The kids are saying; “FINALLY! It felt like Summer would NEVER get here.”

Meanwhile, Mom is saying; “WHAT? IS IT SUMMER AGAIN, ALREADY???”

It’s more than just the kids’ anticipation and Mom’s dread. It’s the effect our long-term memory has on our perception of time.

To explain, when you’re ten years old, the year you just lived through represented one-tenth of your total experiences. When you’re forty, the year you just lived through represents one-fortieth of your total experiences, or roughly one-fourth the amount of time. This bleeds over into and has a proven influence upon your experience of the passage of time, in the long term.

Even though you *think* you don’t remember every moment of your life, you actually do. Everything you’ve ever experienced is there, locked away in your long-term, subconscious memory.


So, if you’re right around forty years old, right now, take a moment and think back over everything that’s happened in your life since 2010…

Inception, The Black Swan and Iron Man 2 were in theaters. We’d just had our first little tease that there was going to be an Avengers movie. Katy Perry’s “Firework” was a *new* song. The 34 miners were rescued from that Chinese mine. Russia had just signed the Nuclear Arms Pact.

That’s how long ago this past April feels to your ten-year-old kid.

So, if you lived forever, by the time you hit four-or-five-hundred years of age, your long-term perception of time would be moving faster than your short-term, moment-to-moment experience. This would significantly cripple your ability to reason-out and execute any kind of plans or long-term goals.

By the time you were two-or-three-thousand years old, human lives would become meaningless to you. People would seem to explode into and out of existence from moment-to-moment as they were born, grew up, grew old and died.

So, from the standpoint of someone trying to achieve something that requires a great deal of time to achieve, being mortal is a terrific advantage.

(This may be the longest segue into an actual point that I have ever made.)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between a long-term goal and the short-term moment-to-moment actions and activity that add up to your results, be they good or bad.

Life consists of choppy waters and either no-wind or wind blowing in the wrong direction, in the best of times. But, that’s good. The human race would not have survived this long if we didn’t all live lives that tested our resolve, our strength, our ingenuity, etc. Smooth waters never made a skilled sailor, and so on and so forth.

This year has been both the absolute worst and best year of my life.

Right off the bat, I lost a hundred and twenty pounds. That showed me that my goals were achievable,… which was something I needed to see, if I were going to go through what life had in store next without just absolutely giving up on those goals.

In the time spent watching my father die, my ship absolutely capsized and sank. I regained a bunch of weight. I paid little more than lip-service to my diet, and I stopped exercising.

I stopped blogging with any regularity or real focus or effort. I stopped making videos. I fell out of touch with what I’d been trying to accomplish.

I’ve been back at it now for a little over a month and I’m making progress again in the right direction. But, I’m also suffering the consequences of that grief-stricken period of drifting. I ended up way off course and it’s taken me a massive amount of effort and focus to get back into the swing of things.

I started my 30-Day Leg-Blitz last Wednesday. It’s a three-days-on, one-day-off -deal.

It’s also a much lighter regimen in terms of actual physical exercises compared to the one I attempted earlier this year.

My legs and back are KILLING ME. They feel as if I’ve never actually used them a day in my life and I just ran a marathon with a three-hundred-pound barbell on my shoulders.

At my weight, exercise has been a fine-line, since I started this journey, between ‘hard-enough-to-be-effective’ and ‘hard-enough-to-injure-myself.’ That’s a tough tight-rope to walk, and now… at this point, thanks to the four/five months of lapse, that line is so razor-thin that you need a microscope to see it.

Injury means no more exercise, means progress slows to a crawl (if not stops, altogether,) means more setbacks.

It’s frustrating.

That frustration exists in the short-term and in the medium/interim. But, in the long-term… weight is only one of the *symptoms* of what I’m actually working on changing.

Two years ago, if this stuff with my Dad had happened, I have very little doubt that it would have killed me too.

But, I’ve just been through it, and I did *more* than survive. I was *of great value* to everyone involved. Everybody, at some point (and for some, at-several-points) leaned heavily on me, and I didn’t so much as wince or buckle a knee. I had to lean on people too, at times. But, during those times when someone needed to lean on me, I not only supported them… I carried them.

Five months of one problem at a time?

Nothing more than a tiny blip.

It is our short term actions that produce our long-term results, and I am a hundred times the person I was two years ago.

See you tomorrow!



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