These days I wake up early in the morning, drag my ugly mug downstairs for a cup of joe, let the dogs out while it brews and take a minute to reflect on life. Eventually I find my way to the couch where I spend the next 15 minutes sipping coffee and stimulating my brain until I can have rational thoughts… then my brain comes alive and I start to sort all the things of life!
Two categories, relevant to my family and irrelevant… Once I have all the things of life sorted, I “take out the trash” … I have been doing this as a learned process of anxiety relief for many years. It’s hard for people to look at me today and imagine the level of crippling anxiety I once had…
Crippled in fear, the future of my three sons was in the bllance. Without sleep, I would get up at 11pm, take Titan (my white GSD) for a walk. I knew I would not enter the bar if I had my pup with me…
I would walk outside the bars of Belle Plaine MN and listen to the patrons tying one on… night after night I would stop, listen and think “One drink!!??” I could just slip away into the world of self medication and lose all my pain? Realizing the truth, I would walk the town until the bars closed, then I would be reminded why I needed to take every thought captive. They stumbled out and swerved all the way home…
Doctors, Lawyers, tradesmen, husbands and fathers… inhibitions lowered and drowning the pain of their own life one shot at a time…
I would return home, take a look at my sleeping sons and remember “I am not alive to feel good, But rather, to be the father I have been called to be!” and the next morning, my day would start, in a similar manner to how I start today… I thank God every day that he sustained me by surrounding me with good men, Godly men. They probably don’t know just how much they mean to me because how do you say it? How do you tell a man that they saved your life by saying “HI”…. Mike, Chuck, Keith, Kevin, Chris, Jay, Todd, Ruan, David, Jon & so many more, I cant list them all….. men of God, men I hardly knew, men that believed in me and spoke truth, passers by… exposing me to life and stability….
I would practice taking every thought captive, how to think positively, how to trust God, moments turned into minutes which turned into hours which turned into days, weeks, months and years…
One of the many lessons I learned was this: “Get up, make your bed”.
I hear Jordan Peterson is using this lesson in his interviews, I don’t remember him asking permission from me but that’s ok, I can let it slide, for now. The idea is, when you get up in the morning, MAKE YOUR BED, and count that as a success. You can make your bed? Straighten out a drawer in your room! You cant do that? Do half! The point is to start somewhere and make that a habit. Something that improves your life, even if its just rinsing out your coffee cup when you are done, do something! Count that as success and build from there to straighten out your life. Add another simple thing in a week, or a month, just start somewhere and build from that point.
Set a goal, make your goal ATTAINABLE… that means make it realistic and something you can do, and then do it! It must be MEASURABLE, you need to be able to actually have something that can be measured, not arbitrary. It must be REPEATABLE, it needs to be something in your life that you can actually do every day, don’t pick something like “clean my desk drawer” if you are not at work every day. It needs to be PERSONAL, not something others would notice, this is about you, not the world. And then you need to DO IT.
It’s amazing how this can make your life manageable and the freedom you feel from success is empowering, and when you fail, because we all do, start over, start over and become successful again.
For me it started in Ecclesiastes 3:8,, with the realization there was a time for every season… A time for hate and a time for love. Our seasons come and go, and there is a time for everything, under heaven.
Don’t quit today, quit tomorrow, just never today. A paradox, because it never actually gets here. Today is the tomorrow you were dreading yesterday. Today never comes. Failure and quitting are tomorrow’s tasks, not today’s.
God Bless, C.
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