I'm not the type of person who uses the first of a new year to make broad proclamations about how the new year is going to finally be the year that I stop doing any of my vices. What vices? Off- the-top-of-my-head, my vices include the following:
- binge-watching movies that I have already seen multiple times
- watching WWE on Monday nights
- binge-watching series that I have already seen multiple times such as
- Cobra Kai
- The Walking Dead
- Ozark
- Breaking Bad
- Orange is the New Black
To me, none of those are terrible things. I mean, what is the harm with watching movies & TV that I like? Nothing, really, unless doing so takes me away from completing other tasks that I need to complete. For example, I binge-watched Season 4 of Cobra Kai by watching 5 episodes on 12-31-2021 & watched 5 episodes on 1-1-2022. Were there other tasks I could have worked on? Sure. I am writing a volume that picks a topic each day that is counting down from 12-4-2021 until Wednesday, 6-22-2022, which is a 200 day countdown to my son's wedding. I wrote a similar volume to countdown the 200 days before my wedding day. In fact, I have written a similar volume ~ 5 times since the original volume, but I don't want to go down a rabbit hole about it. But here's the thing. I am behind in my writing by 16 days so I have some writing to do. So, sure, I could have completed the pages to catch up to where I am writing for the current day. But I want to take a step back and just say that if I wanted to not watch Cobra Kai, I could have just done so... if I was motivated to do so.
And that's the key. I believe so because I subscribe to the idea that (I think) Matt Walsh was talking about in a recent episode of "The Matt Walsh Show" on dailywire.com. I am paraphrasing Walsh's point because when I heard him make the point, I didn't foresee that I would want to be able to cite the specific video in which he made the point I'm about to paraphrase, which is as follows: if you want to make a change in your life, change your life. You either are motivated, from within, to make a change, or you are not. It is a very simple idea and after I heard it, I felt myself embracing his logic. I don't even remember if he said it at the end of 2021 or if he said it at the end of 2020 - I just recall that he said it. Perhaps he even said it when he was talking about Lent and how Catholics believe that they have to "give up something" for the 40 days of Lent. Also, the truth of the matter is that while I use January 1, 2011, as the start of being sober, my reality is that I had actually stopped drinking earlier - perhaps as far back as not having booze from October 2011 through the rest of the year.
So, with all of that said, I have thought about making a major change in my life, which is to always be on time. I am not always late, but I'm late often enough to realize and understand, with some reflecting upon times when I was expected to be someplace at a specific time and not being in that place at that specific time, I acknowledge I can improve. Perhaps the best example of not being "on-time" is on those mornings when I take Karen to work at UIHC, when it comes time to pick her up, say, at 3:45, I will end up not leaving my work until 3:30. It's a tight timeline to arrive at UIHC from my building to where I pick up Karen in 15 minutes. Basically, I need to make every light at the right moment to get through the multiple intersections to be at UIHC in 15 minutes. However, if I leave at 3:20 or even 3:25, I am at UIHC by 3:45. It sounds simple, right? Just leave 5 minutes earlier than I have in the past.
However, I believe there is a bigger aspect to all of this. That's why I am in the process of reading https://lateness.org/ in the hope that I pick up tips & tricks to ensure that, from this point forward, I am not late.
