For a few years, I was at a pretty low spot in my life, you wouldn’t have known it when you saw me out. But that was the thing, I hardly left my condo. I was pretty much was a hermit. I wasn’t working out, I wasn’t spending much time doing work, I was pretty much coasting through life. And the more I stayed home, the harder it became to leave.
At one point I had stopped all together going to the gym, and days I would typically go down the bars that I owned, I would come up with excuses to stay home. Then finally I had enough of being like this. I wasn’t depressed, sad, or scared. I don’t know what I was, I just didn’t feel like doing anything. TV and naps were all the rage to me. But like I said that changed. I was slowly getting my groove back, I stopped making my life to easy to allow excuses to win. For instance I wouldn’t go to the gym close to my home, I would force myself to drive to one, shower there, and once I left the condo, I didn’t come back to dark. The simple change of driving to a gym, seem small, but it got me to leave this comfort zone of going back to my condo, and doing nothing.
However this would ware me down, I was going from one extreme to the next, but as I talked about in a blog about small changes, I would do this a few times a week, then my body and mind would be exhausted, and I would have to relapse. Now it has been a few years since this low light happen, and I’m still working back to my old active self where I would be doing something 5 to 7 days a week. Some days I still crash hard, but never two in a row anymore (well hardly two). You have to understand I was used to working a million hours a week, so by where i said I was doing nothing, I was still probably putting in 40+ hours a week, but I was able to do that from the comfort of my home.
What this all has to do with being active and helping the mind, to me when I was more active, I was less likely to talk myself out of being active. Once I left the condo, my old rationale left with me, slow and steady I was able to build up more and more energy to be more and more active. Don’t get me wrong there are days and hours I still hermit myself to my condo, but the full days are maybe twice a month (if that), and hours I’m not productive are not as many as you would think.
I do find myself being more creative, and finding solutions to problems I have when I checkout I’m not running a million miles, so I do find benefit sometimes of being still. However the trick is not being still for too long or I can feel myself sliding back to being a full time hermit. I guess you could say that is when I go dark, but I’m now able to find a way back to the light.
