Funny how every year, normally for a maximum of two weeks, normally sane people decide to change their lives drastically. Favourite resolutions are to eat less, drink less, exercise more and give up smoking. What is clear is that if your only motivation is that it’s a new year, you’re not going to make it. Sorry, but it’s true. As with everything in life, if the motivation to do (or stop doing) is great enough we will have a chance.
Great motivations include the risk of recurring ill-health or worse, but this often in not enough by itself. We once offered to take a guy in a wheelchair shopping who had lost both legs at different times due to smoking. But was still smoking. It wasn’t that he didn’t need to stop when he began to lose the circulation in his first leg, he just didn’t have enough need to overcome his addiction. It really is peculiar when we know something is harming us but the need it meets is more important than the need to prevent further harm. But it is something we potentially all have and the trick, if there is one, is to add further good reasons until we cannot resist the need to make changes.
I mentioned that I swam to keep fit in an earlier post and doing that consistently only happened when we moved and my work became more sedentary. I wasn’t too fussed myself, but having a registered disabled wife and mother in law living in the same house kinda left the onus on me for lifting, etc. If I didn’t keep fit then we were all in trouble! Didn’t quite work to plan as I got a DVT during our first year, but believe me, the risk of another one certainly gave me sufficient motivation to keep at the swimming afterwards. I think this came to mind as having last been for a walk on Boxing day along the shingle bank to Hurst Point, I went for the first swim of the new year today and shall we say I am physically aware that I did. Whatever you need to change, I hope you find enough need to accomplish it.