Day 92 Record Keeping SRHI = 70
Day 60 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 72
Day 6 Burpee SRHI= 42
Day 106 Eating SRHI = 58
Good night sleep, great wakeup.

Guilt & Forgiveness

Yesterday I felt really down, and because of that I drank a little more than my max of two glasses of wine. I wanted to get out of the house, so I went out. I didn’t get crazy, but the next day I just felt bad. Bad about messing up. Bad about deviating from the Master Plan. Bad about not being strong enough to resist being pushed into a state of feeling down, as bizarre as that sounds.

Trying to create a habit by will is an almost impossible thing, and I think we often don’t think of it in those terms. We create an image of the perfect person - the ideal person - and we make that person an average that we are just too flawed to live up to.

But most people don’t have it together. Sure, one guy might be a doctor, and another might be a work-out master. But does he floss? Does he know another language? Does he meditate and play and instrument or eat right?

I have no doubt such people exist, but they are a lot rarer than we think, especially in the depths of sorrow or guilt, when everyone else seems somehow essentially better.

And that’s the thing - I grew up thinking that a person with bad habits lacked discipline, and that this was some sort of fundamental deficiency. But this isn’t the case at all - it’s a skill that can be built upon, that has to be painstakingly worked on.

Every habit is hard. You will be tested and you will fail. And if you don’t - you got extremely lucky. Do another one, and another one and breaking points become inevitable. Forgiveness is necessary to put yesterday’s failures aside in order to succeed the next day, and the one after.

The goal of forming a habit isn’t that the process will be perfect. It’s surviving the length of time in order to achieve automaticity. It’s a marathon, not a track meet.

I realize that in this stage of this whole project, mood swings will happen, and like a brooding adolescent, I’m seeing loss of poise as a symptom of growth. I’m forgiving myself and moving on; I’ve got a lot of habits to form.