The Truth Is You Never Know Unless You Give It a Shot....

The coolest thing in the world for me is to learn… To acquire a skill is the epitome of being human. Most animals walking, crawling or slithering around have a very limited capacity for growth… A bear learns how to be a bear and occasionally will learn a new skill to help it continue to exist but I am fairly certain bears don’t have epiphanic moments or existential crisis due to lack of knowledge… At best, the bear will try to open the trashcan, get pissed off that it can’t open the trashcan, continue to try to open it and if it happens to succeed, it eats, if not, it walks away… Now humans on the other hand will get interested in something that has nothing to do with their survival, get curious, do some research, try it out, get better at it and acquire a skill that does nothing more than make them happy… how fucking cool is that? You never see a bear playing a banjo, unless you go to Chuck E. Cheese and even then, even the smallest child has suspicions about the repetitious movements and not too quiet mechanical sounds…

Now on the other hand, a human can fall in love with the idea of wanting to do something and then use that love against themselves to actually cause anxiety… I want to play the guitar repeated endlessly for years can become depressing if never actually acted on…

My second turn at a 90 Day Life Change Challenges ended last night in the shower… 

Before I go on, I have to say, showers are my prayer closet for ideas, revelations, deep thoughts and epiphanic life changing moments... Some guys masturbate in the shower and I have ground breaking, life changing ideas… Look at me being exceptional and while you might think a little self absorbed but really I’m not, I find standing up to masturbate weird and uncomfortable… Kinda how you are feeling right now with me discussing it… Anyway, I think because I choose a less primitive exploit in the shower, ideas and other ethereal notions abound in the rain room… Most of my ideas for writing, life challenges and other creative endeavors occur to me in the shower…

Okay, now we can go on…

My second round of 90 Day Life Change Challenges ended last night in the shower for a few reasons… This round had a time set aside to learn to speak Spanish as a second language… I even spent $29.95 to purchase 3 months of an app to speed me along towards my lifelong supposition that I wanted to speak Spanish… However, even desires held for decades may have hidden limitations… First, I realized that I do not want to learn to speak Spanish… I have nothing against Spanish, in fact, my thought was I love the IDEA of speaking Spanish. To be multi-lingual sounds exotic and intellectual. I know that in some cases, speaking multiple languages expands understanding of human communication because the intricacies of a language espouse deeper understanding of meaning and definition. In and of itself, that would be my reason for some level of desire to learn a second language and when I was younger, I thought it would help me lure the ladies into my lair… See how I did that? Got deeply philosophical and then BAM, plummet you into the depths of my depravity… Reading my blog can be like riding a rollercoaster… Existential philosophy dropping  into sex in the same sentence… I should be a writer…

I hope you caught what I was trying to expound there before the joke… I had this very lucid epiphany, my clear thought was “You are not in love with this; you are in love with the idea of this.” This isn’t what will drive you to learn… 

Second reason I terminated the second 90 Day Life Challenge early… Too many activities in one day doesn’t allow me to get good at any one thing… It gave me the opportunity to try a lot of stuff but not enough time with each one to master any of them… 

Yesterday I spent a few hours doing an art project for a co-worker… She wanted a series of sketches for her house and she asked me to make them for her… If I had allotted my usual Challenge time for them, I would have given myself a half hour and it would have taken me weeks to finish them… So yesterday, I blew off my guitar, Spanish and reading time to make a huge mess and finish them in a one shot endeavor that took hours but was productive and satisfying… The fucked up my 90 Day Life Change Challenge schedule completely and in the shower I realized that doing the things I love take far longer than ½ hour a day and I may not want to do them every day anyway… I imagine Michelangelo took a day here and there to do something besides paint or sculpt… 

Finally, my biggest epiphany was that the first 90 Day Life Change Challenge did EXACTLY what I wanted it to do… It dramatically changed my life… It taught me to try new things, bring back old habits that I loved and eliminate the nonsense bullshit ideas of things that I don’t like… I learned that I loved to write, I loved to exercise, I brought back daily meditation, daily reading… I found out that experimentation is key to happiness… Yes, the first challenge was about taking specific times to do specific things and teaching me to stop watching television, stop wasting my life stop doing things that don’t need done and start doing things I want to do… It taught me to try those things I always wanted to try and then when they don’t fit, stop fucking thinking about them…

Isn’t that beautiful? Seriously, I found myself… From now on I won’t think, “I have always wanted to…” Instead, I will set aside time and fucking do it… If I like it, I will add it to the things I do, either often or occasionally and if I don’t, I will not torture myself with thoughts about trying it… My guitar is no longer something I dust, it has become a part of my day, a part of life… I write every day now, be it a book I am working on or a blog… I stopped thinking “I really should write, I like to do it…”

My list of things I have always wanted to do, or things I should try is now far shorter and in reality, I sometimes get cognitive dissonance because that list sometimes disappears and I am left with the thought that I need to expand my horizons and think beyond my limited desires… My favorite thing is still to learn but it has now become a puzzle to figure out what I want to learn… Learning about discovery… I think this is one of the most beautiful things I have ever realized… 

The 90 Day Life Change Challenge did something for me that I never expected, it set me free… By putting myself into a situation that I had no choice for 3 months, it gave me unbounded freedom to see myself as having the ability to do whatever I want to do and the autonomy to cease activities that don’t interest me… Slowly over the course of three months, I carved deep cerebral pathways around the self limiting habits that had a chokehold on me. 

You can have this too… It’s like I always say…

Fucking get to work… Now is always the best time to start…