Change happens one small step at a time. This is something I believe in and practice.
If you do something good for yourself each and every day, you’ll be amazed at where you soon find yourself. Every decision makes a difference. Every moment is a chance to change the direction of where your future is heading.
I consider that to be the fundamental reason I am happy. I have learned how to adjust my life to achieve my goals and to live a life I enjoy. I wake up happy to be alive every day.
Genuine satisfaction is about building our own habits, and cultivating our own happiness. That happens because of how we spend our days and the choices we make.
For example, today (at the time of my writing the first draft of this, it was January 2023) I woke up and made coffee then did laundry and while the laundry was running, I started to paint the kitchen ceiling. When the laundry beeped, I went down and folded it and thought about “How lucky I am to be able to have all these clothes and a washer and dryer to do my own laundry in”.
I went back upstairs and once I had completed painting half the ceiling, I went grocery shopping for dinner and bought everything we needed for dinner and thought, “How lucky we are to have access to all this food so easily”. Everything we need is close to us and we are fortunate for that.
I’ve always known that if you view things in your life in a positive manner, you will find yourself thinking differently and refocusing your mind. When you eliminate negativity and re-frame how you think about certain things and situations, you’ll notice yourself becoming more relaxed.
Success, such as it is defined, is nothing more than a few simple disciplines practiced every day. I believe routine is important to continuous self improvement. They help you establish good habits and break bad ones.
Integrating those habits is not always simple. What I’ve learned is that I personally have to give myself 6 months to be consistent at something NEW. I have found that if I can stay consistent for six months, I will acquire a new habit and see changes in my life.
Here’s my daily routine at this point.
• Wake up naturally, usually just before 7 am.
• Shower/Morning Hygiene
• Go downstairs, open the blinds and make Yim and I coffee.
• Come back upstairs, sit down at my desk with my coffee and spend 45 minutes checking up on emails, usually one or two from the remaining website businesses I attend to, reading where the Globe and Mail thinks the days markets will head and checking up on things that may need to be done during the day. Yim and I talk about what our day is like or about what some emails we’ve received are asking or what we are up to in the afternoon. Easy stuff.
• A quick review of investments. This is important daily work to me: I review our investments and monthly bills quickly most mornings. Financial security is a reflection of daily habits and I got in to this habit more than a decade ago. It’s not particularly that we NEED to watch this daily, it’s more that I enjoy it and it’s not always in the morning. Sometimes it’s after my run or after dinner but every day, I take a 30 minute look. My point is, I manage our money carefully and it is a habit. I consider it my business.
• Then I run 12 K – 15 K. I enjoy this time very much. I never thought I would but it has taken on a meditative quality for me. I work through lots of things in our lives during my run. Before and after I am done, I measure my weight and write it down daily in a document in which I also track all of my food intake.
How has this habit changed my life? When I began walking prior to my surgery, I was 210 pounds. Today, I am 155 pounds, lean and strong. My cardio is steadily improving as I age and my nutritional intake has never been better.
At the same time on most mornings, Yim goes off to a dance class, a ballet class, a strength training class or to teach Zumba.
• Shower Time. Both of us need one at this point.
• Prepare a smoothie for lunch. I usually have a Blueberry Smoothis, which consists of a scoop of plant based protein, 1 cup of Soy Milk, a teaspoon of Spirulina, Collagen, Flaxseed, & Turmeric, black pepper, a bunch of kale or spinach, a banana and frozen blueberries. That provides me with 42.75 grams of protein for the day, more than half of my daily value. Yim usually has a variation of this.
In the afternoons from May to late September, we both try to do something active. Yim often has sewing in the afternoons or practices her dance so I tend to gravitate to my own things.
• 1 hour bike ride. This year I developed the habit of doing much of our grocery shopping by bike.
• 1 hour of strength training. In the summer of 2023, I took six months off from my strength training to do gardening and be outside more on my bike. My testosterone had not returned so the Doctors told me to take a break but now, my testosterone is back to normal so I will start again in 2024 after we return from Italy.
• 1 hour of gardening or inside home projects in the winter months
• Hiking with Yim, grocery shopping, house maintenance.
• Tuesday, Wednesday &/or Thursday evenings from 7:15 – 8:30, I swim.
This winter, I focused on all the inside projects we wanted to get done – re-plumbing and replacing the downstairs laundry sink and installing cabinets, adding a nice vintage clothing rack, which allowed us not to have anything on the floor, installing drywall under the stairs and adding rechargeable lighting, replacing all the boob lights inside the house and replacing the garage door spring.
I also started to write more this winter and create better stories for our travels, illustrated with my own photography. Many of the posts, like this one, are purely journalistic and a form of continued self direction, as I review these at the end of each year to get a better sense of how my life is progressing.
For example, I stopped drinking alcohol on July 1, 2023. That’s a big change after close to 50 years. I decided that if I was to continue my exploration of how healthy I can become, alcohol had no place in that lifestyle. So, I accepted the fact that it was a problem and found the strength and resolve to stop.
• Prepare dinner with Yim. Every day we get together around 4:30 in the afternoon and start prepping dinner. In the summer, that often means picking some fresh veggies from the gardens, giving them a wash and hanging out for a half hour on the deck before we start cooking.
I have been learning how to cook and now contribute at least 30% of all our meals.
Sunday Mornings: Sunday is our one lazy morning a week. I usually get up first and make us coffee. In the summers, we have it on the back deck. We usually begin the day by puttering on whatever is on our minds, doing a load of laundry then having lunch.
Yim then goes to Burlesque around 3:30 and I try and prepare something new for dinner.
• Eliminate or declutter 1 thing from my life daily. I continue to work on simplifying my life and this is the third year that I have worked to eliminate 1 thing from our lives a day. So far, so good. As I age, I find most of what I owned is unimportant to me so I donate, recycle or discard 1 thing a day. I do not think I will be able to complete another entire year of this as our home has become quite minimalistic & mostly necessary.
Evenings. Most evenings, Yim and I watch a bit of Netflix while we have dinner and then break off to do things we both want to do. We no longer watch any television news.
We may go for a walk around our neighbourhood or down to sunset point to catch the sunset. Sometimes I do some writing on my website or read about health or research travels or edit my photography. Yim enjoys puzzles and often practices her dance again in the evenings.
It’s a simple good life.
It’s how we spend our days now and how we spend our lives…
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