The dreaded first two miles
Time for a little check-in. We’ve made it to the end of the first month of the year. This is right about the time when most of our resolutions start to get a lot less exciting. It’s winter and the routine feels harder when mornings are dark. How are you holding up?
Recently, I heard a great adage, “If you never get away from the basics, you’ll never have to come back to them.” and I was reminded that right now is a great time to simply stay the course in my daily routines. Nothing new, just the rote, mundane habits that add up to a life that serves me and keeps me sane. Mine started to take shape this past summer when the sun was still encouraging and the days were long.
Part of my routine is a daily writing practice known as Morning Pages. It’s a non-negotiable exercise of writing, longhand, three pages each morning to begin my day. It’s part To-Do-List-mental-dump, part creative writing (and by that I mean misspelled words, zero punctuation and run on sentences) part journal entry, maybe some pep talk, but mostly gibberish about how I have nothing good to say or any good ideas. It’s obnoxious how my dedication to this practice returns me to center. Through the fumbling, my fingers and thoughts loosen their grip. Ideas start to take shape. I want to stop and reach for my phone approximately once a second, but I won’t because this is what we are here to do. To write. To rack up minutes and pages. They are disposable. Not too precious. They are the practice of being present. Sticking to it. Waking up. Gaining clarity.
Once I got the hang of Morning Pages, I began another unpopular morning habit that closely mirrors the mental gymnastics of writing…running. I start out clumsy with tight muscles and a bad attitude. There’s no guarantee anything will come from logging miles. It’s not until the third mile or so that a cadence forms. It takes that long to drop into a rhythm and remind my muscles what we’re doing here. It wasn’t long ago that I was shuffling through a morning walk and hoping I could string together a walk/jog for one mile. With consistency, over the months, it became 6 miles.
It turns out, the magic doesn’t happen when we think about maybe doing these things. It happens in the slog of the first two pages, the first two miles. Only there is the commitment to ourselves illuminated. In that space, we drop into motion, taking the pressure off to be anywhere else. Our job is here. Now. Present. Fully.
So why bother writing or running? Because I’ve learned that if I don’t, I can’t create. In the space of forward motion, ideas arise. We get to work out the problem and maybe, on a good day, see a solution. It’s not all magic. Some days are garbage, the miles and pages are trash, or we skip the routine altogether and get off balance. In my case, you develop a gnarly patella tendonitis from overuse and substitute weight lifting for running.
Maybe you told yourself you’d drink more water, eat better, exercise more, start meditating, stop drinking. If you seem to have lost your mojo and are discouraged with your year so far, I’m here to remind you that you can begin again whenever you choose. Success is the habitual, incremental steps forward that stack up and eventually move us closer and closer to our goals.
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table, close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”
For more on this topic, check out
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield
Essentialism by Greg McKeown
You are a Badass by Jen Sincero
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamont