The Battle to Behold Beauty In The Everyday

 Sloth and frantic busyness are two sides of a pendulum.  I slept in today.  There’s always a niggling voice when I sleep in saying; “You are wasting the day away!” The voice doesn’t realize that being busy isn’t necessarily a sign of accomplishing anything either.  It feels like stuff has been accomplished though so we feel better.

The mountains are still snow-capped.  It is seventy plus degrees outside with a cooling wind.  Today’s bicycle ride was wonderful; I don’t know if it was the sleep or the change in weather but I felt exhilarated.  I pedaled and thought about beauty. 

I queued Queen on Spotify---don’t ask me why.  Listening to ‘You Take My Breath Away,’ I remembered why. I enjoy their music.  Though not the gospel music I usually listen to; there’s a beauty that overarches the earthiness of most of Mercury.

There are blocks of time; days and weeks of gray where I live in-between busy and sloth where I just go to work; come home to my wife, touch base with my kid—then do it all over again.  God still exists during these times; I barely live like He does.  It’s a slow-motion-blur. 

When I’m in the mountains or at the beach I think, “It would be great to live here.”  I would miss the beauty living those places as much as I skip over and miss the beauty living life where I’m at.  This noticing beauty; this breathing out thanksgiving, is (like so much of life) a discipline.  A battle to behold beauty in the everyday. 

So I remind myself again (How many times, Lord?) to live fully when the pendulum is swinging hard to busy or bending slow to sloth.  And in the in-between times I trust grace and lean on beauty trusting she’ll pull me out of the gray.

Goals Set and Goals Disrupted

Goals set and goals disrupted. Key components of my trip to Portland. Disrupted goals have to do with our encounter with The Foreign Order of Underground Liberty (FOUL), which I’ll post more about next week. Setting goals is what this post is about.

(Note: You may want to add, “over beer” to the end of any sentence in the following paragraphs to give the post that Portland vacation feel).

It’s one of the things friends do, and we built up to it over walks into Multnomah Village to eat breakfasts and dinners. One of the conversations brought up the question of where we planned on being, and doing, within one year. We agreed that any goals set needed to be measurable. During the daily walk, and then at my friends' house/cabin retreat, we continued the discussion.

Upon returning home, I kept coming across things having to do with goal setting. So, I dashed off the last post on the subject of discipline. Which prompted a phone call from Portland, “What are you gonna do about it?”

Iron sharpens iron, the bible says, and that process by its nature involves heat. Now the heat is on. I promised I’d wrestle with laying out some measurable goals. Said I’d post them, with the initial post done before vacation. So here are some of the goals (measurable) that I’ve come up with.

I’ve decided that each of these will need to be chronicled on a calendar (the old fashioned paper type) so that I can make check-marks, or other notations showing goal completed for that day or week. The cycling I’ll note on Excel. Following is a rough draft which I’ll have to refine over the next month.

Goals for September through November.

1) Buy a house plant. Goal date-mid September. This will also entail buying some type of stand that fits.
2) Cycling. This is the easy one. 3 rides per week (or time on Trainer). By end of November, have done at least one 60 mile ride. (Side note: I plan on buying a bike by end of the year; but it’s a loose goal).
3) Memorize Romans 6: 1-14 by end of September.
4) Calendaring. This is probably the most important goal here. I will take one chunk of time every week to lay out the week. I need to clearly delineate days that I do freelance work and days that I play. Set aside days for Sabbath rest.
5) Bible reading/Quiet time. 3 times per week. No minimum time frame for each day, the commitment is to do it, whether it takes 3 minutes or 30 minutes. I should be done with Isaiah by end of September, then moving into Jeremiah. Will continue the delightful balance between reading some scripture and reading some soul-stirring short piece of writing, such as Annie Dillard, Robert Service, Frederic Buechner.
6) Write a will. Have this done by end of November. For those of you reading this; along with the will I’ll have desires for my funeral on my desktop. Please follow accordingly (if I go before you). I’ll do that along with the will.

That’s the short list. I’m off to Yellowstone; so I may come back with more to add.

Discipline, a Common Struggle: Mark Warkentin (Olympian) Talks About Discipline and I Procrastinate

I'm supposed to be working on freelance stuff right now. I just ate, I already put in eight hours, and I really don't feel like it. Those of you who know me will find it shocking, but I'm putting off any application of self-discipline. I'm playing and proctrastinating. That is how I came across mention of a blog by Mark Warkentin, olympic Open-water Swimming contender. Warkentin writes this in one of his posts:

On the trip to Singapore I did a bit of reading. I’m currently reading two books (there’s a point to why I’m sharing this information with everyone). The first is “Disciplines of a Godly Man” by R. Kent Hughes. As one could imagine, the concept of the book is to use biblical teaching for modern application, and even if you’re not a Christian, it’s a good read. (I’m not preaching – there’s a reason I’m reading the book). The second book is “The CEO of the Sofa” by P.J. O’Rourke. The author pontificates on pop culture and politics from the comfort of his living room couch all while sipping a martini. The perspectives are essentially polar opposites.

He goes on to talk about the struggle he faces as an olympic athlete; the struggle of discipline.

The problem is that we all live a fairly disciplined life at home, in fact our discipline at home is one of the main reasons we made it to the Olympics in the first place. Those that can avoid the beer and the pastries typically find more success than those that cannot. Swimming is about discipline and routines and patterns, and we’ve just put a bunch of athletes in a beautiful tropical location where our discipline is going to be tested. (There’s a “no alcohol” protocol, but there isn’t a “no 10 pastries” protocol.)

AND

I became self-aware of the situation while I nearly sank to the bottom of the pool this morning. I have to discipline myself in two ways. First, I need to keep the diet under control. Some people think that swimmers can eat whatever we want in any quantity, but the reality is that we have all become very efficient at swimming and an 8,000 meter workout doesn’t burn as many calories as you might think. Second, because I swim the 10K at the end of the Olympics, I have to train hard for the entire time here in Singapore. While the other swimmers do 3,000 meter warm-up practices and 15 meter sprints for main sets, I have to continue 8,000 to 9,000 meter workouts with a pretty high intensity. I’m going to be doing a lot of swimming on my own while the other swimmers arrive after me and leave before me.

The discipline required to fulfill both of these objectives is not unattainable, but often times we set out to discipline ourselves under the assumption that something is easy and quickly find out that it’s more than we bargained for. I’ve been pretty disciplined in my life and I’m self-aware enough to recognize when I’m being tempted, so it’s a winnable contest, but that’s not to say I can snap my fingers and have complete self-control. The pastries look good, and doing 8x800 on 9 minutes is not really all that enjoyable.

He throws out a good challenge to us all. Whereas he writes that "I've been pretty disciplined in my life," I'd have to say the opposite of myself. This next season I've committed to make some changes in my personal life. Excercising discipline will be necessary if I'm to achieve ANY success. Success in consistent excercise, success in maintaining relationship with Christ, success in work, success in writing. Currently, I'm hardly going at my life with a broadax. Going at my life with a handful of Trader Joe's Milk Chocolate Raisins more like.

"Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one recieves the prize? Run in such a way that you may win.
Everyone who competes in the games excercises self control in all things. They then do it to recieve a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Therefore I run in such a way, as not without aim; I box in such a way, as not beating the air;
but I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that, after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified."-1 Corinthians 9:24-27