Uncomfortable

YESTERDAY

Sitting on the hard plastic seat was like sitting on concrete. A cold piece of cement wedged into my crotch. Why didn’t they make bikes more comfortable?

“Hey, Steve! You coming?”

I grimaced, but managed to smile as I jerked the handle bars straight. My client, Jerry, wheeled his mountain bike around like he’d been doing it forever.

“You’re slow!” he said.

“I’m coming.”

The group home had a few bikes that the clients were allowed to use, so long as they were accompanied by staff. Today, I was the lucky staff member. I cursed under my breath and began to pedal. It wasn’t even like spin class, and I’d hated spin class. Only the instructor had made it palatable.

The road tilted, and I overcompensated by swinging my handle bars to the right. I missed a parked old Civic by inches.

“Let’s go, Steve!”

I growled and followed my client down one of the back streets. Why was it so hard to pedal? Had I grabbed the only dysfunctional bike the group home owned? Why did people think this was a good idea?

There’d been a time when biking was a lot of fun. Until I’d bought a car. Cars were fun. They had padded seats. They were less complicated. And I never worried about driving into a parked vehicle.

I knew the refrain about riding a bike, about how it got easier and how once you learned how to do it you never forgot.

I could only snort. Yeah. I could do it. But it didn’t make it any less uncomfortable.

“Hurry up, Steve!”

I didn’t respond. My legs were already burning.

SHELTER

“Are you a cop?”

Three black teenagers stood loosely around a weathered table. We were standing outside. The sun was hot. They wore loose fitting clothes, and the one addressing me had a broad smile on his face.

“I’m sorry, what?” I said, struggling with his thick accent.

The teenager squared his shoulders and imitated a robot. “You a cop? You walk stiff. You have beard. Muscular.”

I shook my head. Smiled. “Nope. Not a cop. Youthworker.”

I was at a homeless shelter for young people. I’d been there for a week. I was the only white face in the entire place, staff included. It held forty five young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty four, and while I liked working there and enjoyed getting to know the kids, it was disconcerting to feel so pale.

I’d written often about privilege, talked about what it meant to be white and male and straight and all the advantages it held in our culture, but it was my first experience being such a distinct minority, if only for a short time.

“My name is Stephen,” I said, extending my hand.

He took it, laughed again, and introduced me to his friends. The shelter’s yard was dingy. A few picnic tables. Sparse brown grass. A rusted fence. Staff had laid out supper on a few tables. Huge silver tins with aluminum foil folded back over each one.

It’s impossible to imagine – with any idea about what it’s really like – to be a minority when you’ve never experienced it. I tasted it for a week, barely, in a work environment where I still held power and could leave to a more “regular environment.” So in a way it hardly counts. But it still gave me a glimpse of the challenges these youths faced, of the challenges that people of different cultures faced when they dared leave their country. I’d seen it before. Seen what happened when minorities spoke up and what it meant for them. What it cost them.

But it was a reminder.

And it was uncomfortable.

HOME

Cars stacked in a traffic jam below my balcony. Rush hour. I shook my head, grateful my work ended early. Sitting in a line of cars was stressful. Especially in a place like Toronto, where movement was tied to both efficiency and success. Hell, all you had to do was listen. You could hear it in the massive steel buildings that scraped the sky and the hundreds of thousands of people who packed the subway, their eyes empty and fully charged. If you weren’t getting ahead, if you weren’t full bore for whatever was next, you either lacked ambition or were falling behind.

And nothing was worse than falling behind.

My last month had felt that way. I’d worked nearly to the point of burnout. My place was a mess. I was still living in boxes. I was struggling to keep up with the bills and laundry and other basic tasks. I was grateful for the work, but it had come at a cost. I was still adjusting. Still learning to push the constant noise of the city to the side.

Still uncomfortable.

COMFORT

“Comfort” means different things to different people in different cultures, but we are all searching for it. Something to do with finding equilibrium about our circumstances. With reduced stress. Something more than just coping. It was a place that I, too, was anxious to find. It’d been a while since I’d experienced it.

We all feel that pull away from discomfort. I’m fine at work, when I’m with my kids, and when I can see the difference I’m making in their life. Or when I’m at the gym. Or when I'm at home, where I can call a friend and toss back a beer and relax. I can, and do, purposely avoid things that make me uncomfortable. I’m human. We’re all wired this way.

And yet, for all that the past couple of months hadn’t been "fun," they'd been rewarding. I’d learned new skills, gained confidence in a way I hadn’t imagined, found myself growing stronger as I faced each challenge – even if the challenge was as mundane as working sixteen of seventeen days without breaking down. I’d dealt with the stress, the discomfort, and the exhaustion. Dealt with it and surpassed my limitations.

That never would have happened if I hadn’t been pushed out of my comfort zone.

One of the great lies of society is that we should measure the status of our life by how we feel. If we “feel” good, which we often translate to ‘safe’ and ‘secure’ and ‘comfortable,’ than things are going well. This is true in everything from relationships to living conditions to our work.

And it is a lie.

Progress – spiritual, mental and physical progress – is never achieved when we are fully at ease. Though we try to avoid these situations, humanity is at its best when it is pushed and stretched and forced into new places.

For all my frustration about the summer, I’d been forced to go farther than I could remember, and my life had changed dramatically.

I wasn’t comfortable. I hadn’t liked it.

But I was better for it.

TODAY

I swiveled my handlebars around and coasted down the street, enjoying the cool breeze on my face. Heat swelled from the asphalt.

“Hey, Jerry? You coming?”

“Yeah!” he said, flashing me a grin as he peddled to keep up.

We passed a number of old houses that looked like they’d been around since the Second World War. One of them looked like it had been burned recently, with a blackened porch and smashed windows. It stood in contrast with the one beside it. A blue Honda Civic glistened in the driveway. Orange and red flowers dotted the porch.  

I twisted past a huge pothole. “So where do you want to go today?”

“Let’s go to the beach.”

 “Are you sure?” I asked him. “There’s a big hill to get there.”

“No problem. I can do it. I’ve done it before.”

I laughed. “Yes. Yes, you have.”

What Do You Want?

When we're young, we're asked this question a lot. What do you want for breakfast? What do you want to do this weekend? What time do you want to leave for your soccer game? We have little control over our environment and our world, so we rely on our parents and guardians. We even rely on them to think of these questions, because the concept of creating our own world isn't feasible.

Eventually we move out. We get a job or go to college. We start our careers. And as life passes, we never think to ask ourselves, except vaguely, the one question that dominated our childhood. Perhaps we find someone, a partner, who is willing to ask us. Perhaps we're motivated enough to go on a retreat or vacation and ask it ourselves.

But most of us forget. Most of us get caught up in the routines of daily life, that unending cycle of busy-ness and business, and what once seemed so important now seems like the question from a children's story. It never strikes us that it's the one question that will dictate who we become.

The Most Important Person in Your Life

Who is the most important person in your life? I'm a Christian, and I know some friends who will say 'Jesus.' Others will point to their spouse, their children, or one of their parents. All of these answers are selfless. All of them speak to generosity and kindness.

And all of them are wrong.

The most important person in your life is you, if only because it is the only life that you control, and it is the only life you can change. Yes, you can have great impact on people around you, whether its your kids or your partner or your friends, but you can't make their decisions for them. You can't create their world, no matter how hard you try.

In psychology they call this 'self-care,' this notion that you have to look after yourself before you can be of use to anyone else. If you don't take care of yourself, if you're miserable, everyone else is going to feel it. That said, most of us don't identify as 'miserable.' If I asked fifty people how they felt about their life, I'd guess that about eighty per cent would say that they're "doing okay." That life was just... life. Most people would consider their complaints 'common' or 'part of life.'

If I were to rephrase the question, however, and ask if their was one thing they wanted. One thing that they could have, all things being equal, I would get a very different response. Why? Because everyone can think of one thing they want -- whether its a vacation to a certain place or a skill they never learned or just more time to themselves -- and when its asked without impinging on what they do for others, its easy to find something. In some ways, it's like asking for a dream, and everyone has a dream or two that never quite panned out.

We Have To Be Practical 

If you had asked me six months ago what I wanted, my answers would have been vague. A healthy marriage. To manage my depression in a positive manner. To be happy. If you had pressed me, I would have said something like selling a lot of books, though I doubted such a thing was possible. (I would have said it apologetically, with a smirk and a shrug, like someone who buys a lottery ticket.)

If you had pressed me further, I would have said that I couldn't control these things, and that I had to be practical.

I would have been wrong.

That is, I would have taken an important truth (I couldn't control certain things) and turned it into a lie. Which is exactly what I did. In turn, it sowed the seeds for the worst year of my life.

Dead In The Alley

I spent most of last year lying prone in a back alley. My depression had kicked me to the ground in a way I'd never experienced. My relationships eroded, some of them souring so badly the damage was permanent. A month ago, I experienced a loss so great, so unexpected, I was no longer certain of anything. If I'd spent the previous year lying in a back alley, this event was the equivalent of someone sticking a knife in my side while I was face down in a puddle.

It was like waking up into a nightmare, where one plus one no longer equaled two. A place where the sun rose in the West, and when it did rise, it burned like gasoline over an open wound. And in this scorched earth, I was forced to re-examine everything. Well, either that, or just give up. However kind I had tried to be, however generous I'd wanted to be, and however concerned I'd been for other humans, none of that seemed to matter.

Life Doesn't Keep Score

Sometimes life hands good people a lot of pain and sometimes it doesn't. Believing that life was unfair was probably true, but it was also unhelpful. I had a choice, made stark by my circumstances. That choice was to get up, find a different approach and do things differently, or wallow in self-pity.

The first week I wallowed. Much as I had the year before, when I didn't understand why the world seemed so dark. I complained bitterly to God about my circumstances, about how it wasn't fair. Why bother being a good person when life was just going to crush me anyway? And yet, somewhere in this vague haze, I heard a single question, over and over.

What Do You Want?

At first, the question enraged me. I wanted what everyone wanted! I wanted to be happy! I wanted a healthy marriage. A job that I liked. A life I could be proud of. The question refused to let go, probing my mind, goading me, angering me.

What Do You Want?

I told you what I want, dammit! I want the same shit everyone else around me already has! All my friends have these incredible lives with great families and nice homes. I want what they have! The voice refused to relent. Refused to leave me alone.

What Do You Want?

Like a child after a tantrum, I remember mentally slumping against the wall of the alley, too tired to fight anymore. And so I thought about it. No more lazy answers. No more vague niceties. Nothing to do but answer the question. And so I did.

The answer was surprisingly simple. I wanted kids, and I wanted to own my own house. Yeah, I know. That doesn't seem like much of a revelation, does it? But my path was unlike that of my friends. I'd been a writer for the past twenty years, an aspiring novelist. My day job was working with special needs kids. I'd never made very much money. Not enough to consider buying a house. Not in one of the most expensive cities in Canada. As for kids, it had always been a dream, but never practical. I didn't make enough money to consider having them. And so much of my life seemed wrapped up in my writing. And yet, as soon as I said, out loud, what I really wanted, the voice left.

We Must Be Practical

The lie I'd believed earlier, that we only controlled certain things, was only a lie in the wrong context. Yes, we only controlled certain things, but we had far more control over our life than we imagined. This was, again, a revelation. By stating aloud (and writing it down) what I really wanted, these two simple goals that were deeply embedded in my subconscious, I felt a weight lift off my shoulders.

Pointing Our Life Towards the Solution

Those two simple goals, difficult but not unattainable, created something I hadn't seen before: a map. They were markers on a board I didn't know existed. Whatever else I wanted -- selling a lot of books, good friendships, a life of giving back -- revolved around those two locations. And with those two goals in place, I was able to start placing other markers. If I wanted a house, especially in this market, I would need to work. A lot. I would need to squeeze out TV and mindless surfing to be able to keep writing. My writing would have to become more efficient. If I wanted a family, I would have to switch my priorities, be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to put children first.

For the first time in a long while, I stopped worrying about the questions and unfairness and complaints about my life and started seeking solutions. Something vague and hopeless had just become a math problem. A challenge. One plus one suddenly equaled two again, and if I didn't have all the answers right away, that was okay. I could do this. It wasn't going to be easy, but I could do it.




First Steps

As I chewed on the end of my pen, poised over my recently acquired "goal" notebook, I realized the first question I needed to address was that of my mental health.This meant understanding what my depression meant, how it worked, and what I needed to do to manage it in a healthy way. Last year I'd been blindsided, but mostly because I lacked the tools to see what was happening. If I was going to stay healthy, I would need those tools, which included professional help, accountability from my friends, and other resources. I could not have a family and go AWOL for a year.

The first thing to go was alcohol. No more drinking. I'd used it to manage my depression, to take the edge off, for the past few years, but the more I drank, the less it worked. Depression makes it difficult to control your emotions, and alcohol is a depressant. It can fool you for an hour or two, but it's an illusion. And it only makes things worse.

So I stopped drinking.

I'd also learned the past year the importance of regular exercise. The endorphins and physiological benefits helped counter my depression and gave me confidence. So I set a goal to work out thirty to sixty minutes every day.

I haven't been in this kind of shape for nearly two decades.

I needed to be more efficient about it, but I still needed to write. I thought about my regular schedule. I tended to be a night owl, but never really accomplished anything after 10:30pm. So I would need to go to bed earlier and get up earlier.

I'm up by 6:30am every day now.

One by one, I was able to draw branches from my two goals and create smaller branches needed to support them. I'd expected the process to be hard. Instead, I found myself motivated. Excited even. The pain of recent events had not diminished, but I was doing the only thing I could do; I was taking control of my life. I couldn't control the people around me. I couldn't control how they responded in certain situations or what they thought about me or the way some would react to this "new"me. And frankly, I didn't care. I was more excited about the possibility of something great than anything anyone might say or do. I had, if unwittingly, created purpose in my life. Something for my compass to point to. I wasn't about to give that up.

There were, and still remain, other questions. Other challenges. I have a new job, and it will be challenging. I will be expected to work in some difficult environments. I will be expected to do some things that make me uncomfortable.

Even that creates one thought: bring it on.

Fear was no longer part of the equation. I could handle it. I'd taken the hardest blows the past year, and I was not only standing, I was creating a new life. If I had learned one thing, it was this: the choices we made dictated our life.

Movie Moments

I've always loved inspirational sports movies. (Rudy is at  the top of the list) I love the scenes that show the hero or heroine getting knocked down and getting back up again. Of course, in a movie, those scenes depicting weeks and months of hard work only last for twenty or thirty minutes. But they inspire me just the same.

Why? Because we have the ability to do that! Because we have more say in our life and who we become and what we attain then we realize. Because we are the ones who determine our life.

E + R = O. Event + Response = Outcome. 

We cannot change the events in our life, but we can change our response. That is what determines the outcome.

What Do YOU Want?

So let me ask you this. What do you want? Take a look at your life, really look, and tell me what it is that's missing. Maybe you're one of the lucky ones. Maybe you have everything you ever wanted. Maybe you can't fathom losing everything or feeling like you were dumped in an alley. Chances are, however, that there is part of your life that feels incomplete. Relationship issues? Familial difficulties? Job problems? Or maybe you want to try that new hobby. Maybe, if you're honest with yourself, you realize that you're just going through the motions. that you 'lost control' of your life a few months ago or a few years ago and have no idea how to get it back.

I know that feeling. I've been there. Hell, I feel like I spent too much of my life there. But if I've learned anything, I've learned that we CAN control our world. We CAN create a new life. New habits. New routines. And yes, it may be painful. It may require more falls, overcoming fears we didn't realize we even had, and thinking about ourselves in a completely new way.

But you can do it. We can do it. We are all so much more than we realize. We are not just a mother or a husband or a friend. We are not just a son or an accountant or a deacon. We are more than a profile on a page. We are beautiful and boundless and limited only by our own expectations. We are unique and special and gifted. And we are all here, together, sharing time and space and relationships, for one purpose: to make this world a little bit better.

I don't have it all figured out, and I'm not writing this to suggest that my new life, my new approach, is easy. It's not. There are days when I am torn about the past year, days I wish I could go back and scream at myself to get off the floor and do something. And there are nights when it is hard to fall asleep, because the goals I've set seem so very far away. Nights when I feel very much alone, as if the whole universe has gone quiet. As if I've set some impossible tasks for myself that won't make a difference.

But those are lies. To get to where we want to go, we have to create new patterns of thought, and consequently new habits, that refute those lies. Dwelling on them does nothing but bring us down, however difficult that is at times. We have no say over our past, all we can control is our future.

So today, before you get into your daily routine, before you set your weekly schedule, might I suggest something? Look in a mirror, look at that beautiful person staring back at you, the one who has been with you through every heartache, every sorrow, and every storm, and ask them this one question.

What do you want?

-Steve

Training Tip; Just Show Up

There's an old adage that eighty per cent of life is showing up. When I was younger, I would have said that eighty per cent of old adages are a load of crap, including that one. Or in my (self proclaimed) infinite wisdom, I would have suggested that the problem with our society is that there were too many people convinced that showing up was all that was necessary. But as I grudgingly enter “middle age”, that adage rings far more true than it did as a young man.

Life is busy. There's work. Family. The occasional night out with friends. More work. Learning how to hold a sword properly. Chores. Learning a second language. More work. Other kids. More chores. Baseball. More work. And oh yeah, no sleep. (That's why adults are always annoyed with energetic children. Hey, we'd be energetic too if we got eleven hours sleep every night and other people made our meals.) So with all that, hell yes, showing up matters. Whatever bruised, hungover, exhausted state we might get there, when you're older, getting there is a freaking win.

Next to a terrible diet, the inability to find time to work out regularly is the biggest obstacle for people who want to get in shape. They'll find one long window of time during the week, make the commitment, and have a great workout. They find another ninety minutes in their schedule six days later. Another great workout. And so it goes. Unfortunately, you won't make any progress that way. As a trainer, I feel my clients frustration. After seven or eight hours working with crazy loud Grade Sixes all day, my first inclination is not to go to the gym. (Usually, it runs something along the lines of wanting to pour myself a very strong drink, weep softly as I stare into nothingness and wonder why they insist on shouting ALL DAY.)

Even after twenty five years of working out, the only way I get there regularly now is to make a small promise to myself. I call it the Twenty Minute Rule.

It doesn't matter how I feel, or how much time I DON'T have, I can spare twenty minutes. Let's be honest, twenty minutes is a coffee break. It's a stop at the grocery store or a too long conversation with that guy at work who never stops talking about himself. We can all squeeze in twenty minutes. And we can do it three, four, or five days a week. As long as you get there, you'll see progress.

Two things to remember. One, twenty minutes IS enough. Don't start lengthening out your workouts and somehow change the promise. If you go one day for sixty minutes, you still owe twenty minutes the next day. You can't borrow time. Second, make it a hard twenty minutes. Don't stop, don't wait between exercises, and superset everything. Waiting around is boring, and you won't accomplish very much in twenty minutes if you only do seven or eight exercises.

It still surprises me when these old adages are true. Maybe I'm getting old. Maybe I underestimated how busy life would be as an adult. Or maybe I've suffered minor brain injuries working with young people for nearly twenty years. Whatever the reason, getting to the gym after school for twenty minutes has helped keep me fit and (mostly) sane. I can't make any promises regarding your sanity, but you'll definitely feel better.

-Steve

Dealing With Rejection

         

When I was in Grade Six, I fell in love with a girl in my class, Kathy. She was smart and pretty, and I was smart and… pudgy. I did everything I could to win her over. Notes. Compliments. Jokes. Clearly tired by my advances, she finally told me she liked  another boy in our class, Craig. Moreover, she told me she liked Craig for his body and me for my brains. (Is that why I became a personal trainer? Hmm.) I was so infatuated with her that I started hanging out with Craig. I thought whatever he had might rub off on me.

It didn’t. My infatuation didn’t fade, however, and for the next three years, until the end of Grade Nine when I switched schools, I kept trying to convince Kathy to go out with me. I didn’t know it then, but if I were to sum up my writing life in one analogy, that’d be it.

These past two weeks, I’ve sent queries and sample pages to seventeen agents. So far, I’ve received six form rejections. Not a sniff of interest. Yes, it’s early. And yes, dealing with rejection is part of a writer’s life. But it still hurts. Especially when you really haven’t had much success in the field of your choice, when you’ve been chasing the same girl, the same dream, for twenty-odd years. I suppose I could try to spin that, try to come up with some positives when those form rejections pop up in my inbox, but I already did that this past weekend. When you take the long view, you can find some light in the darkness. In the moment? Well, in the moment it just sucks, and if you can’t accept that, can’t admit that it feels like your innards are being ripped through your nostrils, then either I want what you’re smoking or there’s an American Idol tryout in your future.

Here’s the thing, though. Most of us feel that way about one part of our life. Whether it’s our kids, our relationships with our family members, problems with our friends or a situation at work, it may not show up in our inbox from a literary agency in New York, but it still smells like rejection. Hell, often it feels like life itself is rejecting us. That all of our plans, all of our hopes and dreams somewhere, somehow, got flushed in life’s sewer, and gave us THIS LIFE instead. Depressing? Yes. Discouraging? Yes. Unusual? Nope.

And it’s that last part, how “unusual” we consider our experience, that strikes me as the one place you can find silver. (Maybe not a whole lining of silver, but a few rough nuggets) When someone tells me that I “can’t possibly understand how they feel,” I am acutely aware of two things: One, they’re right. I have no idea how anyone feels because I’ve never been, not to my knowledge at least, anyone else. Second, it tells me that such a person is in for a very long life, and so are the people around them. As much as the rejection, in whatever form, completely and totally feels like a rusty blade has been jammed into my ribs, I can take some comfort in knowing that we all have knives in us. That these are the things that make us human. And that most of the plans we make, even in an ideal society, usually go awry.

Does that make the form rejections in my inbox any easier to take? Nope. Do I still want to throw my laptop out the window and scream about how I’ve wasted my life pursuing something that very, very few people ever do well enough to succeed? Yes. But it’s also the moment when I identify with more people than I usually do, when I watch someone else fail and shake my head because I know how much it hurts. Rejection draws me closer to the people around me than success. Failure leaves a different kind of stain then the times when things have gone exactly as we hoped.

Some of us experience rejection on a daily basis, and with issues far more serious than a lifelong quest for a book deal. I’ve worked with many kids over the years who experienced rejection from one or both of their parents, and for reasons that were utterly enraging.

But anger isn’t the answer. Neither is giving up. Somehow we must find a way to live in that place where the healthiest of us manage to thrive, that place of dreaming and acceptance that acknowledges our humanity, acknowledges the random nature of life and the hardness of it, without pulling us away from the bigger visions God gives us. It’s a difficult place to be. It requires a self-esteem that doesn’t need extra attention for our particular difficulties, but one that is self-aware enough to know when we need a bit more help.

I’m not sure I’ve always fallen in such a balanced manner, and I’ve been grateful over the years for people who have modeled that gracious kind of life. If I could pick one difference in the ones who modeled grace and those who haven’t, that difference would be compassion and gratitude. That is, all of them had in some way dedicated a portion of their life to helping others, and all of them were grateful for the things they’d been given. Like extra legs on a table, this provided them with stability to face the storms and purpose to keep going when their own dreams didn’t work out as they’d hoped. It didn’t allow for the Navel-Gazing Trap or the Black Hole Syndrome characteristic of people who believe that “no one will ever understand.”

Listen, we understand. We’ve all been there. So what do we do when it happens? And really, is there a question in life more formative to our character than that one?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can tell you what I’m going to do. Tonight, I’m going to allow myself to be upset for a little while and howl at the moon a bit. When I’m done, I’ll hug my wife, grateful I’ve been given such an amazing life partner. Tomorrow I’ll go to school, and on the way there, I’ll thank God for the trees and farms and the new commute to work this year, one that lets us live in a beautiful little home in a quiet section of the city. When I’m at school, I’ll encourage my kids to the best of my ability, walk with them while they negotiate early adolescence, and when I come home, I’ll make sure that our two young neighbours are doing okay. Somewhere along the way, my cats will get a number of belly rubs and I’ll share a laugh with my wife and friends.

And the next day? The next day, I’ll get up and keep writing.

Whatever your journey, wherever you are, keep going, my friends. You can do it. Even when it sucks, even when the girl of your dreams says ‘no’, your value is more than you can possibly imagine. And if we happen to meet along the way, maybe we can grab a coffee and talk about it. I’ve been there, too.

Much love,

            Steve

Encouraged

Day 41 of 420 000

NOVEL WORD COUNT: Ummm… a lot

Another day. Another city. Another Starbucks. And coffee… lots of coffee. Necessary on three hours sleep. And no, I'm not procrastinating. Not exactly. Although my novel is currently open in another window and I haven't written a word yet this morning. But I'm not procrastinating. Uh-uh. Okay, maybe a little. But I was going through some of my recent posts and realized that I offered enough encouragement lately. Let's face it, one-note writers are boring, and while it's fine (and interesting) to take note of problems caused by religion or politics or annoying people, we also need a healthy dose of positivity or else why are we bothering to get up in the first place. Yesterday, as I was going through the book of Ecclesiastes in my morning reading, I came upon this verse:

"There was a man all alone; he had neither son nor brother. There was no end to his toil, yet his eyes were not content with his wealth. "For whom am I toiling," he asked, "and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?" (4:8)

It's the thing I love about the book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Some of the verses can hit you like a hammer. Like this one. It was written three thousand years ago, but applies to so many of us. It's a question we often forget to ask ourselves, and suddenly our lives become a whirlwind of busy. We forget who we're working for, why we're working, even though we already have enough. Years go by, and suddenly we realize that we've missed the point of it all. And through it all, change becomes almost a dirty word. That is, changing our life, reordering it, becomes frightful and taboo. Much better to just stay busy. And yet, there are always people willing to challenge that notion, people willing to re-examine and slow down. I was thinking about it last night as I drove home from the boot camp I'm running. (My day job, the one that pays the bills, is working as a personal trainer.)There, I watch and listen to people who haven't worked out or challenged their diet in years, driving directly from work to the camp, making all sorts of family accommodations for a fun but brutal workout. I listen to their stories, the craziness of our typical North American lifestyle, and yet there they are, not willing to accept the status quo. It's the best part of my job. A month ago I had a good chat with a woman at the gym who'd lost over a hundred pounds. Her whole life has been changed. How she feels. How she thinks. Everything.

As a writer, I'm used to being "poor". It's a sacrifice, if you can call it that, every artist makes, so I don't miss making big bucks and being able to buy whatever I want. Walking through a mall induces no desire in me to spend money, with the exception being bookstores and electronic shops, but even then, the library works well enough and we don't have room for a 52" Sony Bravia HD television just yet anyway. That said, the question of why, as in, why am I working so hard, is just as relevant for me. Why do I want to publish my novels? Why am I driven back to the page? Is it just about me? What I love about the question is that it centers me. It reminds me that I don't have to let other people set my goals for me. It reminds me that change is always possible, so long as I'm willing to make the adjustment. I find that encouraging. This idea that tomorrow doesn't have to be a repeat of today or last week is marketed pretty heavily in the self-help sections of your local bookstores, but I think most people get discouraged by the slowness of change and give up. Anything worth pursuing requires commitment, but commitment is much easier when we answer the question of why we want to change. For whom do we toil? And why do we deprive ourselves of enjoyment?

Take some time today to answer that question, and then take a good look at your life. If you could change something, what would it be. Set it in your mind and go for it. You'll be surprised what you can accomplish.

-Steve

Note: My brilliant wife started her own fitness blog this past week. She's the best trainer I've ever seen, and her nutritional knowledge is second to none. I encourage you to take a look.