Congratulations were in order.
May 27, 2021, marked my 365th consecutive day of meditating. A whole year! I was proud of myself for finally “possessing” the ever elusive consistent practice I’d spent years chasing, and I could feel its many benefits manifesting in my everyday life. I’d become calmer, more centered and detached, although not less driven, so I kept this next logical step in my self-improvement campaign private, noted the accomplishment on my calendar by the treadmill, and started my daily squats.
As amazed and impressed with my meditation tally and emerging quads as I was, unfortunately, I’m now untangling how this noble quest to become a better version of myself somehow morphed into my life being ruled by calendars and checkboxes.
I think it all started the year I turned fifty. I wanted to form better, healthier habits, and stick to them, while also avoiding procrastination and excuse-making. In other words, I was asking for a miracle.
I knew I was capable, though, so I planned an epic trip to Alaska and bought an expensive treadmill to train for it. Suddenly, there it was! My new Fitbit and its accompanying app recorded my accomplishments: 10,000 goal steps a day [almost] every day for a year.
I’d nailed my 2017 New Year’s resolution, and I had the records to prove it. Spurred on by my success, I expanded my horizons into more meaningful, life-changing practices.
Because I wanted to recommit to a daily journaling practice (and because I had this cool planner from Alaska and no idea what to do with it), I started with a gratitude practice. Every single day for the entire year of 2018, I wrote down three things for which I was grateful. Sure, some of them were passive-aggressive—“I’m grateful for the job security of having more work than any human could possibly do in a lifetime” or “I’m grateful for the speeding ticket I got today as a reminder to drive more safely”—but the point of the matter was to improve myself through daily writing and gratitude practices, and I did. Check and check.
With that writing commitment successfully established, I bought a bigger journal, one with a page for every day, and decided it was time to “habit stack,” a term coined by James Clear in his book, Atomic Habits.
So, for 2019, in addition to daily journaling and gratitudes, I resolved to be more professional, and onto my morning writing, I stacked dressing up and cleaning up my potty mouth. I did much better, professionally-speaking: I put some dusty dresses from the closet back into rotation, replaced SOB’s and F-bombs with more creative language, and dutifully made non-descript checkmarks in the corner of my calendar.
While I was happily filling journal pages, turning into someone who might someday be able to show her face at church again, and marking my daily progress, my friend, Renee, and I were also dabbling in some 30-day exercise challenges (the plank challenge, the arm challenge, the squat challenge, to name a few).
I recorded our progress on the calendar in my exercise room, right next to my daily step count and Nordic Track’s workout of the day location and distance, and we learned a few things along the way: singing patriotic songs almost makes it possible to hold a plank longer than two minutes, we’re more likely to do our age in squats in a day than to do 150 (!), and any challenge is made far easier when we do it together.
Fast forward to New Year’s 2020 when Renee and I were in Jamaica with the husbands. We’d both read about the benefits of meditation and needed a new challenge, so we resolved to “strive for five,” just five minutes of meditation every day for the entire year. Neither one of us had consistently meditated before, but how hard could it be?
So there we were, jumping right in, eyes closed, standing in the water—breathing out stress, breathing in joy, breathing out judgment, and breathing in One Love, mon. We discovered Jamaica has lovely breezes, and five minutes is a long-ass time.
We spent 2020 learning more about mindfulness, checking in with each other on our weekly walks, wearing stretchy pants on Zoom, and, above all, trying not to break the meditation chain. I stole this “not breaking the chain” concept from Jerry Seinfeld’s practice of writing a joke a day, but I’m here to testify that this meditation thing was absolutely no joke. The struggle to slow down, to sit, to meditate was very real, but it became much easier as we discovered classes by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, the Insight Timer app, and meditation’s many benefits.
Most importantly, we talked through the successes and challenges of our practices together.
I kept track of my meditation progress in my journal at first but stopped once the app started doing it for me. That freed me up to stack even more habits onto the well-established-morning-routine-machine I was becoming. By mid-2021, I’d habit-stacked two kinds of squats, my own personal three-part adaptation of the arm challenge, a sun salutation, and a plank held for my age in seconds onto my pre-existing practices of journaling, getting at least 10,000 steps, working on my novel, and doing a few woo woo-type things I’d rather not publicly disclose at this time—often all before work!
The checkmarks were very gratifying to me, and provided evidence to my doctor that I had in fact been exercising, but it’s clear I’d become obsessed: Jonesing for that Pavlovian jolt of a job well-done, I’d go to the calendar and check each individual task off immediately upon completion before moving on to the next item.
Pride goes before the fall, so unfortunately and predictably, I know the pain that comes from breaking the chain. Before the end of 2021, I’d accidentally lost my 400+ day Insight Timer meditation run and with it, my mojo.
Like any reasonable 54-year old woman, I rebelled. Did I really need to keep track, to do so much, to be so militant? Daily meditation? Absolutely! Squats? Pushups? Planks? Come on!
Perfectly imperfect, I soon found myself in a place where I’d abandoned the calendar, taken up cursing again, sworn off zippers, and realized I wasn’t truly meditating so much as playing something on the app to check off a box and get “credit” for it.
As I reflected upon this five-year journey of change and growth, what I knew for sure was traveling the world by treadmill, walking and talking with good friends, and practicing meditation saved my sanity during the pandemic even while those self-improvement checkmarks threatened to take it away.
I vowed to be more mindful. Again. And kinder to myself. To begin again.
In an effort to get back my pre-pandemic body and, more importantly, my post-pandemic mindset, every day since that realization, I’ve mindfully and thoughtfully meditated and counted my many blessings, and, almost every single week, I’ve gratefully walked through all kinds of weather with Renee.
These essential practices helped me learn how to show the same compassion and grace to myself that I give so freely to others and progress to a place where I do what I can when I can exercise-wise without recording it on a calendar or seeking out anybody’s congratulations, even my own.
Terry Shamblin Writes 