A few years ago I signed up with my personal trainer in September.
I say my personal trainer. We have an on again, off again arrangement that he has been extremely gracious about.
And I remember feeling quietly pleased with myself. September, not January. I was not one of those people who appear on the second of January with a new water bottle and are gone by the third week. I had chosen a serious month.
He let me down gently. September, he said, is the busiest month of the year in the gym.
So much for being the special one.
He was right. January is just a date. September is when life actually resets, with the uniforms and the timetable and the new class, and that is when the pull to begin again properly is strongest.
That same September I had also bought the planner, the good one with the ribbon, the new trainers and a meal plan for the whole week. By about the nineteenth it had all gone - well, the trainers were still useful for looking cute on a Saturday. ;)
But what I took from all that was not that the plan had been too big. It was that I am the sort of woman who does not follow through.
That was not true, though it took me an embarrassing number of Septembers to work out what was.
The plan had six moving parts and nothing underneath any of them. It was never going to survive one bad night's sleep, and it didn't, which is a fact about the plan rather than about me.
If you have been saying something similar to yourself since January, the same applies to you.
Your one thing this week
Do not start again. Resume.
Pick up the smallest version, at exactly the size you already set, and do only that. Then leave it alone until it is boring, and add nothing until it has been unremarkable for a fortnight. Boring is not the warning sign we take it for. It means the thing has stopped costing you anything to do, which is the only state in which it will still be there in November.
Do not despise the day of small things, as Zechariah put it.
And if you abandoned something last September, or the September before, you are not resuming from zero. You are resuming from everything you learned about why it fell over.
That still counts.
Health in your body, peace in your soul, purpose in your step.
Lolu :)
