This morning I asked my 19 year old son what I should write my blog post on today. The first thing he said was choices. I asked him what big choices he had to make. He said whether to go snow machining today at -15 degrees or not. I laughed. Then he said discipline. I asked him what he meant by that. He said, not the type of parent disciplining a child, but of a person just being disciplined. I asked if it was like him going out and working on fixing his dirt bike every day for 30 minutes until it’s finished kind of discipline? He smiled and stopped giving me ideas!

It’s funny that he mentioned discipline though, because it’s something I had been thinking about recently. I had decided to try a different kind of scheduling. Instead of creating a weekly schedule, I created a monthly schedule all on one calendar, thinking that would work better, or at least wanting to try it. Nope, that’s not the best way for me to organize my time.

I had not wanted to sit down every single week for the 10 minutes it took me to look over my week to keep it fresh in my mind, I just did the whole month all at once. But what I found was I kept forgetting to add things to the schedule; also, my goal list and my things that needed attention were quite long but unorganized because I didn’t have room to write them with the week they corresponded with. This resulted in frantic, last minute preparation for our recent market because I kept forgetting to look at my to do list and associating it with the right week (as I get older I think I have more time than I really do). I learned a good lesson, I hope!

I also have been thinking about it concerning my overall health. I have ups and downs as far as how disciplined I am in my eating and exercise. I have learned that the food I eat affects every aspect of my physical and mental well being. When I am eating healthy, I have more energy, my mind is clearer, I have less age related aches and pains, etc. I do really great for a time, and then I slowly taper off to eating too much sugar, and not paying attention to the inflammatory components of the foods I eat. I then start having problems, like shoulder pain, risk of bladder infections, tired all the time, and so on.

I do see progress though. I go a shorter space of time between the slow degeneration of my diet and exercise program and getting back on track. This time of year I find it harder to stay on track with all the holidays, but knowing it’s harder helps me be more mindful of regularly exercising, how I eat, the types of food we prepare, and how many desserts we have for the big meals, I try to keep that down to just a few favorites.

There are so many areas of my life that require thoughtful discipline, exercising, working on my business, helping my husband with his business, eating healthy, staying organized… I have ups and downs in all areas of my life, but I am grateful to see some progress here and there. I am grateful for my weekly schedule. I find it interesting that my weekly schedule helps in most of these areas. I’m glad I have the contrast now, and can see what works better for me.

Discipline is hard, but the consequences of not being disciplined are hard also. I try to choose the disciplined hard, or at least I strive for that almost everyday.