This is often living daily episode 1524, Flexible Structure, by calling right-of-exile.com, and I'm just a model of the guy who's been reading articles, book excerpts, even soon at SACU every day, including holidays for over four years, covering personal development or self-help, how to live a better life, and a lot more. It's always with permission from the authors or websites, just hit the subscribe button to get new episodes for free. Today's post is being from exileifestyle.com, so let's get right to it, and start optimizing your life. Flexible Structure, by calling right-of-exile-life-style.com.
I try to get too caught up in ritual. I enjoy routine and predictability on a visceral level as much as anyone, and being able to plan around these mornings or afternoon workouts makes it simpler to distribute other tasks throughout my day. But also knowing I can break these patterns on a whim, and even bend them when warranted without harming the overall structure I've built. For the past half a year or so, for the first time since my university days, I've been running every day.
I built myself back up from sluggish, unable to move at speed for any duration, to a regular, comfortable three miles a day with regular elevated walks mixed in for flavor. Recently, over a period of about a week, my schedule was dramatically altered by an opportunity, one that required I act immediately, messing with that nice, reliable, running ritual I'd come to enjoy. I found the perfect motorhome for my upcoming tour and had to do a lot of driving, learning, repairing, cash with drawing, and negotiating, all within a very short period, and with a little time to prepare. But it became ideally routine and was blasted to bits, and although I told myself that I'd keep running throughout, I brought my shoes and shorts with me on the drive.
There was just no way to make it fit, I missed everything else I was doing that week. Then your constant stress of spending a large amount of money, the consistent reminders of how little I actually knew about what I was getting myself into, the physical strain of driving a series of vehicles and varying lengths and air conditioning situations for days at a time, off and through mountainous roads and tenses, yeah, it wasn't happening. I thought I could make it happen, but I couldn't. I was too drained, and there simply weren't enough hours in the day, most days.
Fortunately, I built a fail-safe into my running habit. I allowed myself when I felt a twinge in my leg, or when I had a particularly exhausting week, or for no reason at all, just because I felt like it, to take a day or two off, to defy convention and butt the trend I worked so hard to develop. I allowed myself to break my habits semi-retinly. If you can do that enough and come back to the habit after, if you can train your brain and body to expect that you'll return to it after a period of way, that break becomes a bend.
It becomes a lean flexibility, a give, rather than a fracture that cannot be repaired. Concrete, unyielding structure can be useful when building new, beneficial habits. This is especially true when replacing old, perhaps simply outdated, perhaps actively harmful habits with something new. It's a good idea to stick with it whatever shape your day takes.
Sometimes a step away from that path is actually a step backwards, and one that will be difficult to come back from. At the same time, though, there's an inherent fragility and the idea that if you break a habit even once, even for one day, your entire system will collapse around you. Is that the kind of structure you want to be building? Does it feel particularly sturdy or safe, this framework that will shatter if your plans are changed, or the variables in your life necessitate a temporary adjustment to the norm?
Whenever possible, I prefer to tether my habits to a different type of foundation. Rather than relying on the habit, the structure itself, to hold me up, I see there's just another means of toning my existing willpower. And that willpower is shared between all the things I do regularly from my daily run, to the voice exercises I can sometimes be quite taxing, to the creative writing sprints I do each day, to more isolated projects, like glitting my way through the first trap of a book, or learning all I can about a new topic before recording a podcast episode about it later that week. In this way, I haven't made that 30-minute daily habit a low bearing element in my life.
Instead, it's something that relies upon a more fundamental muscle that I maintain and exercise in countless other ways, on a regular basis, in which I know can take the strain. The muscle system can hold habit in place until I come back for it after a wild week of motorhome purchasing, or after a few days allowing it to rest, to avoid injury. The field of earthquake engineering is a fascinating one, as it's predicated on the concept of the safest, most reliable building is the one that's most capable of safely diffusing the dangerous energy of an earthquake, rather than the one that is the most heavily reinforced and staunchly constructed. I tend to think of those terms as I engineer my lifestyle.
I want something that can stand tall in all circumstances, not just ideal ones, something that can weather the seismic changes that life brings. I strive to build life that can absorb, or redistribute, or dampen, or even harness and utilize those shockwaves, so that the whole structure doesn't come crashing down around me as soon as the ground starts moving. I want foundations that can shift as the world shifts, alike with the type of structural integrity that allows me to feel comfortable building skyward, whatever, to future my brain. You just listen to the post-title flexible structure by calling right.com.
Thank you, Colin. I really enjoy this one because it challenges even my own beliefs and the way I've done things. I've also been the type to be all or nothing. I like to go for streaks of doing something every single day, and then if I miss a day or two, I tend to feel defeated and then don't want to quote unquote star over.
When in fact we aren't ever really starting over, that's born to remember. I know I said this on the show before that you can use an all or nothing mentality to get yourself to do, even a tiny bit of something every day. Like if you can't keep a habit of exercising, maybe just do five push-ups, and you can do that every single day. It'll only take 30 seconds, but it's still kind of inevitable that one day you'll either forget, or you won't be able to do a little something for whatever reason.
So it's important to remember that breaks are okay. Just don't let that break. Get to you. Jump right back on and get back to it.
I needed to hear this myself, so hopefully it gives you a little push, too. And I'll leave it at that. Thank you for listening, being here and subscribing to the show. Please do subscribe for free if you haven't already.
Have a great rest of your day and I'll be back tomorrow as usual, where you're optimal life.