May You Have an “Interesting” Life

There’s nothing like a couple of surgeries, business travel, and a few vacations to throw off a person’s routines. And those events have run right up and into the holiday season, making personal goals challenging. In the first half of the year my work environment was so difficult that I was tempted to change, not only my employer, but even an entirely different career or industry. That’s not to say it has been a miserable year—there have been and continue to be plenty of very enjoyable adventures. And even the painful days have been down payments on a healthier future. But each flavor day added up to a very busy and “interesting” year. On the upside, no resolutions were broken, despite a few being hampered or paused. Now that the crazy is subsiding I can review my plans. My discipline targets for the rest of the year, and the next, are specifically (and in priority): spiritual, physical, and mental.

Spiritual

Christianity may be simple, but it’s not easy. Forces constantly conspire against even basic goals, so I don’t set myself up for failure by setting lofty and complex targets. Exercising the fundamentals is the wiser approach and a lifelong challenge. Those simple and life/world-changing fundamentals are twofold: be in the Scriptures and in prayer. For prayer I want to expand my focus on gratitude. For immersion in the Scriptures I have a healthy habit established listening to podcasts: Alister Begg’s daily sermon series “Truth for Life,” Moody Radio’s weekly “The Land and the Book” with its Israeli-centric focus, and Tony Walliser’s weekly sermons from Silverdale Baptist Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee (where I was a member before migrating to Atlanta). However I also needed a first-hand, on-hands study of the Bible directly. I tried to find a local Bible Study class since that avenue had been a successful structure and source when I was in Chattanooga. But, to date, I’ve not found one that was a good match. Therefore, I’ve just started a project to grammatically structure the epistles. Structuring is a technique I learned as part of the leadership training curriculum at Precept Ministries. It differs from sentence diagramming taught in grammar classes, which is very detailed and at the word level. Structuring is at the clause level, and thus easier, more intuitive, and definitely more useful (to me). The core of structuring is to break the text into clauses and apply indentation to indicate dependencies. This process slows me down just enough so that I actually ponder the text. But it doesn’t slow me down so much that I get lost in the minutia. Since I was already in the process of reading Phillipians, that’s the first book I will structure. And, new to my structuring process will be the use of the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament. Translation can sometimes obscure the original grammar, so this tool will hone the accuracy of my clausal divisions and relationships.

Physical

I’m grateful for the health gains I’ve made this year. With another recent surgery sandwiched between business travel and holidays, it’s been unrealistic to continue the weight loss. With Christmas looming, my goal for December is maintenance. I’m going to enjoy the holiday treats and I’ll resume my weight loss efforts in the New Year. To prevent regression I donated all my old, big clothes. And I’ll use the fit of my new, smaller clothes as both the metric and motivation for moderation.

The mandatory interruptions to exercise, however, are now gone, so I do need to resume those immediately. Thankfully, my Aqua Aerobics class recently restarted so I don’t have to wait until January to leverage that opportunity. But I will have to get creative to replace the walk/jogs that I previously enjoyed. Now that the weather has turned cold and rainy, I will have to find indoor venues or alternative exercises.

Mental

Creativity is more of a mental skill, of problem solving, than an emotional experience of the heart. The two forms that I had hoped to focus on (writing and artwork) have languished in the latter half of this year. However, I was able to practice creativity in other forms to stave off atrophy. For Halloween, I had fun putting together a costume for this year.

And for Christmas I volunteered to decorate the neighborhood entrance. I sketched out the plan over a photo of the entrance sign and then purchased the components to build the display. My wife, Susie, helped a lot during the assembly phase and together we mounted and wired the finished pieces.

And for a Christmas gift, I crafted my son a “dice tower” using a video from https://blackmagiccraft.wordpress.com/ as a guide. All these projects were more craft than artistry, so in the new year I hope to sketch/paint regularly. Daily is too aggressive, so after I get underway, and learn what is realistic, it might normalize to once a week or a set number of hours.

Each stone in the tower was individually cut from XPS foam.

Writing practice hasn’t been as satisfactory. I’ve continued to do plenty in my day job, but blogging and fiction stagnated. The blogging is easily excused as I haven’t had worthy topics to share. Although my health journey has been important to me, it’s either boring or awkward for the general public. So I will continue to only post on topics that might actually be beneficial. Then I realized I could update site visitors on the reasons for the protracted silence and this “meta” moment resulted.

The fiction writing goal is not as easily dismissed. I have been working with some new tools to help with the writing process. But tool experimentation is not a replacement for actual output. And the sad fact is that I get lots of good ideas for beginnings and very little to bring them to a conclusion. For example, I’ve recently started on a new idea with its attendant world building, exciting locations, interesting characters, and magic system. But I don’t have a worthy and motivated antagonist from which to build a plot. And without conflict, I cannot transform all these intriguing objects into a story. Perhaps I can blame my busy schedule. I’m hoping to take some long, quiet, thoughtful hikes to work on these quandaries. Instead of music or silence I’ve been occupying my mind with podcasts, sermons, and audio books and haven’t given my brain the opportunity to chew on these meaty problems. I certainly hope that has been the issue rather than my own ineptitude.