The Joy of Following Your Passion
Be well and be adventurous
Part of getting healthy is being strong enough to follow your dreams.
To not have physical boundaries.
I don’t want high blood sugar to set limits on my life. When they told me I was pre-diabetic, I knew at that moment: I’m making changes. I have so much to do! I can’t let a lifestyle disease slow me down.
That’s what’s causing so many Americans to be sick these days: chronic conditions which are exacerbated or created by the way we live. Our sedentary lives filled with bad food have left 1/3 of us overweight or obese. The weight gain is just an outward indicator of how ill we are. The parts we can’t see are the diabetes, high blood pressure, poor circulatory systems, poor heart health, poor gut health, poor everything.
This is my big why for my health journey: I want to be as healthy as I can so I can do all the things I can.
I want to fly across the country to visit friends in the West, and *not* have to use a seatbelt extender! (It is so embarrassing.) I want to be able to play fetch and run around the backyard with my dog for more than five minutes. I want to be skinny for my niece’s wedding.1
As many of you long-time readers know, I started this Substack as a way to procrastinate on my true passion project: writing books. I’m nearly done with the first! It has been a journey. Some days I was so irritated with it I simply pushed it aside and huffed away, leaving the computer alone. Some days I’d write for hours.
I knew that unless I made consistent progress I’d never get anywhere. My favorite writers have routines. I needed to do the same. Here’s my routine for breaking the writer’s block and stopping the procrastination:
Yes, that’s a kitchen timer.
Here’s how I’d use it: I’d set the timer for 20 minutes. I’d tell myself – you have to write for ONLY 20 minutes. Don’t think of anything else. Don’t worry about whether it’s “good” or not. Just write.
When the timer dinged, often I found that I was deeply interested and kept going. Sometimes I’d say, ok, that’s it! But most of the time, I did more.
That’s how I became consistent.
And now as a treat, I’d like to share with you the first chapter