February - Week 2
Some ups and downs, but overall feeling good.
Meditate at least 5 minutes
Not as good as last week, but still pretty good. When my morning routine is changed, that really seems to be what gets me. I feel like it's hard to do places that aren't in my own space, but I think I'm just putting too fine a limitation. Do I really _need_ my eyes closed and sitting in seiza position? No, but perfectionism tells me I do and that makes it so I don't have to do anything. Focusing on your breath is great.
I am also finding that starting my practice with three 5/7/8 breaths (in/hold/out) really gets me in a focused state much earlier. I still have a hard time maintaining focus, but that's just practice.
Journal one page
No worries on this one, easy.
Exercise (minimum walk 1 mile, goal is run half mile, 3 sets of burpees, or some sport for an hour)
Still waiting on getting back into running, but with my Aikido practice, working on the house, daily walks, and exercise otherwise, this one has been easy to maintain. I biked to my Aikido class a couple times and my bike's lowest gear is not accessible at the moment. Unfortunately, this meant sore glutes and sore legs because I overtaxed them, so I need to get that figured out before I can keep biking.
Express my mood honestly to my partner
My mood was generally good, so it was pretty straightforward. But had some tough stuff come up this week and was able to express that. Feels good normalizing taking up a little more space than I usually do.
Get ceiling and walls done in the master bedroom of the house
Just yesterday we finished getting drywall on the ceiling in our master bedroom. Huge move! Had some buddies come by and it was a great thing seeing that all go up. Easy too!
Next step is a slight detour in getting the rest of our ceiling materials up on the east side of the house, since we have a ton of space-taking insualtion and ceiling drywall, may as well use it while it's here. Then we'll have more space to get the wall drywall and faced insulation for the walls of the master bedroom. We may SOON be able to live in our house, which is hilarious how weird that is.
Volunteer twice this month
I'm continuing my work preparing for the neighborhood emergency team's test/etc. Eventually I do a few on sites that take some time, so this is all in service to that.
I'm slightly nervous that I won't make my written goal here, but I'm working towards the goal directly. The goal is there to drive me the direction I want to go, and I have many lead indicators telling me I am going there. So this feels good. I do want to do at least _one_ in-person volunteer event before the end of the month.
Go to one community event
I went to a neighborhood association meeting this week. I've always heard that nobody comes to these things, but I was one of four people. It was pretty surprising! This specific meeting was about improving neighborhood accessibility for non-car transportation (pedestrians and bicyclists mainly). I didn't have a lot to say, but it was interesting how this transformed a feeling of inaction and inertia into at least feeling like I'm doing something. We'll see next month if any progress was made towards the initiatives we set, as I'm not one of the people actually taking actino on them, but it's kind of a fun game to see what happens next.
If you haven't, I highly recommend going to a city council meeting or neighborhood association meeting. It lets you know directly what the values and priorities are of your community. And usually, by numbers, you are given a much larger amount of influence than you think.
Go to three Aikido classes
Went three times this week and had a blast. Love the people, love the philosophy, love the craft.
Spend 15 minutes praticing lockpicking
This goal kind of fell on the backburner this week. I got some new locks that are very mushy and don't have a lot of feedback. Practicing with those has put me a little too far on the difficulty spectrum, and since I don't have the sense for if I'm succeeding or not without finishing, I don't really know if I am doing anything at all with it. Not super fun. I think I just need to go back to the simpler locks or find another beginner lock that is more helpful in teaching me what I should be doing. Lots of resources for this though, so just need to find the things.
No screens from 8pm to 8am
Was hit or miss. Sometimes I'd get done doing all the things I did in the day and just needed to soothe and my most easy to access soothing mechanism is throwing on Youtube. That's a hard habit to break. But I have been reading a lot more and that may take it's place if I can have a good fiction book always on hand. Our living space now is small so that's a harder thing than it would be in a house, but it's very possible. I have Ursula Le Guin's "The Lathe Of Heaven", and am excited to dig in to that.