Quick Week

Ok, ok… I know I’m late on this by a couple days. I have been super busy with school and time has gotten out of hand lately. I’ve been struggling to keep to my schedule as much as possible and have decided that Time Management will be one of my projects for the rest of the week.

I’ve kinda given up on my Video Journal for the moment. I just can’t seem to get the right lighting and my camcorder is a pain in the arse. I’ll try to get to it in a couple of weeks once things calm down a bit around here. Once I do get them up and running I may only do them on special occasions.

Anyways, the last few days I have been thinking a lot about my spirituality and have been looking into Buddhism. I’ll post more about this in my Spirit section, so check it out.

Other than that I am getting excited about getting my ticket to Burning Man. Just have to wait for payday. Online ticket sales started today, here’s the link: http://tickets2.burningman.com/  I’ll post a pic of my ticket once it arrives.

Not much else to report. I have been trying to find people that have been to burning man to chat with, but I’m having a hard time getting any replies. I guess I could just join the forums at the Burning Man website, but I was hoping to find a more personal avenue of discussion. The search goes on…..

2 weeks down, 33 weeks to go!

The last week has been a fun one for the most part.  I spent New Years Eve alone this year for the first time. That was kind of a bummer, but it gave me a chance to really take a good look at where I want to be in my life and how I will spend this year to make it happen. 

Sometimes in life you find yourself all alone and it can be overwhelming and depressing, you may even start to think that maybe there is something wrong with you.  There isn’t anything “wrong”, everything in life changes from time to time, you have the ability to make changes in yours to make it what you want it to be.  History is full of people that came from nothing to achieve great things, you and I aren’t any different. 

The key I’m learning is to first start small, find something you can change today and do it, walk the stairs at work, turn the TV off and write something, donate some food to a shelter, anything that is radically different from your normal routine as long as it’s “doable” for you. Don’t set a goal to high at first that you can’t achieve it.

The second key is to follow through.  Procrastination undermines success, I know this because I used to be a chronic procrastinator, I’m still fighting it everyday.  I use to roll my eyes at people that would tell me to set goals, after all I knew what I wanted and was smart enough to get it without a dumb “goal” needing to be set… WRONG.  I was the fool for not listening and the fruit of my ignorance is a lot of wasted years in a rut. 

Goals are of major importance if you want to achieve anything, don’t rely on your superior intellect to make things magically happen, they won’t and if they do, it’s most likely because someone else did the work.  Just start with daily goals, stuff you can accomplish each day.  If you smoke, don’t just quit cold turkey if that hasn’t worked before, just set a goal to smoke less than the day before.  If you hate working out, try to set a goal to only do 15 min per day for a week until you decide you can do 20, then 30, etc.

The best part about all this is that once you start making little changes and continue to follow through with your goals, you will start to feel more confident and proud of yourself, and in the end your worst critic will always be yourself, so if you can beat that you are well on your way to being happier.

Yes Man

I just got back from the movies, I went to see Yes Man with Jim Carrey. The movie was pretty funny, as most of his movies are, but the message it sent really hit home with me. In the movie Jim’s character Allen makes a covenant to say yes to any opportunity and ends up changing his life. While I don’t plan to say yes to every opportunity, I did relate to the need to be more open to the things around me and it made my resolve to continue this even stronger. It was the perfect movie for me to see on the first day of a new year.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I’m really excited to have 2008 behind me now and to have a fresh start moving forward on my journey. I wish you the best and hope that this year turns out to be one of your best ever.

One week later…

Ok so it’s been a week and a day. I have been fooling with my video camera trying to make my first of what I hope to be weekly video journals that I plan to add here. It has been a harder than I thought to produce. I have lighting issues, I had to buy a tripod, the camera doesn’t like to let me pick which takes I want to publish, etc. I think I may have it all figured out now and hope to have it up just in time for New Years day.

All in all, my first week was pretty good, I had a few misfortunes, but I worked through them. This week I plan to add some more pages to this blog that will be updated as needed to help keep the spam down on this main page. I have had the opportunity to do some soul searching this holiday season and I really feel good about the year to come. I’ll be glad to put 2008 behind me, but I can’t help but to be grateful for all that I have gone through because it has given me the drive to become the person I plan to become over the next 34 weeks.

I guess it’s easy for us to look at all the things that aren’t right in our lives and allow ourselves to become defeated and depressed. I personally feel that everything happens for a reason and what may seem bad for us now may become the catalyst for great things in the future. Too long I let myself be a negative person, I still fight everyday to try and be positive when I catch myself acting that way. I like to think that negativity is similar to alcoholism, you can use willpower and spiritual insight to fight the urge, but once you have suffered from it, you always have to be on your guard not to fall off the wagon.

I have been trying to make my plan of action for making the changes I want to make this coming year and I decided to break everything down into categories and they are:

Mind,  Body,  Spirit,  Misc. and Poems and Such

By using these categories I hope to keep myself balanced and organized during this process. Wish me luck.

Have a happy New Years and I will talk to you all soon.

First Day Accomplishments.

So today was the first day of my 35 week journey and I chose to do two things to help improve my body.

The apartment complex I now live in has a weight room with all kinds of exercise equipment. I ran on the treadmill for 15 min and worked on weights for another 15 min. I started doing 25 reps of 30lbs in 3 sets focusing on my shoulders, chest and arms. I plan to increase my reps by 5 every other day until I double and hit 50 reps of each. Once I hit 50 reps I will start to increase the weight by 10lbs every three weeks until I top out. For my legs I did 25 reps at 40lbs, 15 reps at 50lbs, 10 reps at 60lbs and 5 reps at 80lbs. I’ll increase the weight by 10lbs every two weeks staying with the same number of reps.

The second thing I did was to drink my last Mountain Dew. I have been hooked on it for many years and it’s time to be finished. I know I will have to suffer through so Caffeine withdraw, but it’s for the best.

My story

They say that change is a good thing, that it ushers in creativity and new ideas that can lead to profound moments in time. This blog will be the journal of changes that I will implement in my life starting tomorrow Dec. 22nd, 2008. I won’t bore you with the story of my life before this point, it really doesn’t matter, but there are some things that I feel I need to include here to add context to the changes I will be making and the inspiration behind those changes.

First, my name is Matt. I am 37 years old, separated and a father of three children between the ages of 6 and 9. I’m currently going into my second semester of college after enrolling back in Oct. My health is average, my build is average, my life is, yes, you guessed it…. average. I never really saw myself in this position when I made my plans for the future, but none the less, it has become my reality. 2008 was a hard year for me and for most of it I was just scrambling to hang on. It would have been easy for me to have just given up and conformed to the path most men my age take that are married to women that don’t value them and just have accepted my fate. I’ll admit that I tried, but luckily I was too late and she insisted that we split up. By her forcing me to leave my comfort zone and get back out into the world after 10 years, she may have unknowingly saved the essence of who I am. A few months have gone by since I left and I have been forced to take a hard look at who I have been and the choices I have made. I’ve also had to take a serious look at my future and where my life is heading. I’ll never claim to be perfect, my fate has been of my own hand and I have many flaws. However, I also believe that people can change and when placed in dire times, some can rise to meet the tide and overcome it. I plan to be one of those people.

Over the course of the next 35 weeks (I’ll explain this time line soon) I will be adding to this blog on a regular basis chronicling my successes and failures. I’m not doing this for attention, quite the contrary, I’m a very modest person. I’ll be blogging here as a way of holding myself accountable to make the changes I need to make and to have something to look back on once I do. I will be sharing things about myself that I’m not comfortable sharing because I also feel that the fear of being perceived as weak or flawed in the eyes of ones peers is a solid motivation for one to make changes. So, let me take a moment and say thank you to all those who will make this journey with me, because your vision of me will be key in my success.

I stated above that I am giving myself a time frame of 35 weeks to accomplish my goals. The reason for this is that starting on Aug 31st, 35 weeks from now, is an event called Burning Man. For those of you that don’t know what Burning Man is, I suggest that you visit www.burningman.com and check it out. I have never been to a major event like that but I have always envied those that have. Whether it was Mardi Gras or Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale, FL. or many of the other festivals out there. I have always wanted to go, but there was always something or someone that would interfere. That ends now… At the end of Burning Man, they burn a huge effigy of a man and I find this to be the perfect symbol of what needs to happen in my life. Everything that I have been up to this point has gotten me into the situation that I am in. Only by becoming a new man out of the ashes of the old will I ever be able to succeed and be happy in life. I also find Burning Man to be a perfect fit for my inspiration in that it encourages radical self expression. A friend of mine asked me if I was having a midlife crisis, and I thought about that for a second and had to answer yes. I am in a crisis of identity of who I am and who I want to be. I feel fortunate because crisis is usually a great catalyst for change.

So, now you know why I’m doing this, why I chose the time frame of 35 weeks and why I chose Burning Man as my goal to accomplish the things I need to do. I look forward to your comments, suggestions and support.