a few weeks ago i wrote a blog post, the scrunchie challenge, where i felt inspired by a post at monk at work to change a habit.
i said i was going to keep a scrunchie on my wrist for three weeks, to remind me to ground myself whenever i wasn’t experiencing my body enough. i also said i was going to check in with you occasionally and report back on october 12. i turned it into a meme and tagged a number of people with it.
i didn’t keep the scrunchie on for a long time. i only checked in once, and barely at that. i didn’t report back on october 12. i didn’t really follow up on the meme. nobody took me up on the meme.
what a failure. of course you didn’t remember any of this because i’m not important enough and now that you’re reminded you just snort and say, geesh, what a flake. and how unreliable. i’m so embarrassed.
i better never start a meme again. obviously i can’t follow through on it. and you guys are going to think of me forever as an unreliable, flaky failure.
STOP!
REWRITE!
okay, let’s try this again.
a few weeks ago i wrote a blog post, the scrunchie challenge, where i felt inspired by a post at monk at work to change a habit.
i said i was going to keep a scrunchie on my wrist for three weeks, to remind me to ground myself whenever i wasn’t experiencing my body enough. i also said i was going to check in with you occasionally and report back on october 12. i turned it into a meme and tagged a number of people with it.
i kept the scrunchie on for a few days. i still remember what it looked and felt like. something small shifted in me. since that post, i’ve been paying way more attention to my body. i feel more “in” my body.
one of the things that happened as a result of that was that i became aware that an old but irritating sinus problem had crept up again. i watched it for a while and decided not to have any sugar at all for 10 days, see whether that makes a difference. i’ve never done that before and am now on day three of that.
it also prompted me to work more on meal planning, to coincide better with my daily biorhythm.
i really gained something from this exercise! i guess there were a few things that i didn’t do and i would have preferred to have followed up on the announcements i made but, oh well, live and learn.
what’s the difference between the first story and the rewrite? the events were very much the same. what i focused on was different.
what have i learned from this process? what is my “metalearning”?
- how the look and feel of the physical reminder of the scrunchie imprinted on me. even though i didn’t use it much, it still stayed with me.
- how important it is to learn things over and over again. i knew about each and every one of the points here but for them to be effective, they need to be reinforced once in while.
- one things leads to another, and there are always surprises. i certainly didn’t think that this exercise would lead me to experiment with cutting out sugar!
- if i just keep at it and keep being open, i can always find new ways to deal with long-standing challenges such as meal planning.
- that, when i focus on my learning, what others think of me becomes uninteresting.
- next time i do a meme and nobody takes me up on it, i will first follow up on the people tagged and if that doesn’t work, tag a few more people.
- and that i can look at any thought, action and event in the light of learning. i don’t even want to say success. success brings up the dichotomy of success and failure. learning, on the other hand, is open-ended.
a heartfelt thanks to jennifer from heal pain naturally for inviting me to participate in the think differently meme. i had been wondering how i would write about the scrunchie experience and when i got jennifer’s tag this morning, it all popped into my head.
because that’s what i’m doing here. thinking differently about success, failure and learning.
who else wants to think differently? this meme was started by fellow vancouverite peter, so maybe i’ll tag a few more people from here. please read the guidelines for participating here. i’m tagging carol, paul and maggie.
(this post appeared in the 25th total mind and body fitness carnival)