Everyone wants to improve themselves.  There is something about everyone that they’d like to change, whether it’s their health, their career, their outlook, something.  Change, real change, is very difficult to do, however.  It’s easier to rationalize or procrastinate than it is to follow through and try for various reasons.  One is complacency, that pernicious voice that whispers that hey, things aren’t all that bad, so just sit down over here with a box of HoHos and we’ll get ’em next time, champ.  Another is fear, like I talked about yesterday.  The fear of failure is brutal, since the person you are failing is the same person you look at every day in the mirror.  The self-loathing that accompanies it is crushing, which makes it harder to contemplate making the changes you want to make for yourself.  Fear is the enemy, always.  There is only one real solution to making changes:  Do it.  Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month.  Today.

I’ve been letting myself get more and more out of shape over the last several months.  It bothers me a great deal.  Just having my elbows brushing the flab gathered at my sides as I walk makes me cringe and hate myself.  I feel weak and ineffectual.  Briskly going up two flights of stairs leaves my heart hammering and lungs gasping.  I need this to change.  Part of it is vanity, sure.  I want to be the best-looking person I can be, just for pride.  But what’s becoming more and more important to me is actual health, keeping my body running for as long as humanly possible.

I have friends who aren’t much older having heart attacks.  Someone I work with had a brother-in-law 5 years younger than me die on his kitchen floor in front of his 4-year-old daughter.  She told her mom that Daddy was sleeping in the kitchen and she couldn’t wake him up.  Dead at 32.  I know it can happen anytime, that healthy people die too, but goddamnit I want to live forever.  Not happening (until they build my cybernetic body), so the best I can hope for is to try to extend my healthy life as long as possible.  I want to be a spry 80.  I don’t want to spend 20 years in a wheelchair or bedridden because I didn’t do enough to take care of myself.

I’ve been telling myself for months that on Monday, I’m working out again.  On Monday when I’m tired, it becomes Wednesday.  On Wednesday I don’t feel like it, so I say the weekend.  The weekend comes and I don’t want to, so I say Monday.  It’s been like this for months.  Enough.  I’m working out, today.  Tomorrow, I will do so again.  Will I miss some days?  Yes.  Will I probably abandon it at some point in the future?  There is a good chance.  But that doesn’t mean I should just give the fuck up and let it happen like some passive spectator in my own life.  Fuck that.

Maybe it’ll help change the rest of the things I put off, like career changes and finishing my novel and starting another one.  I hope so.  The only way to find out, though, is to do something about it and fucking try.  Today.