Choosing Perfection

Today is the last day of my one month of daily blog posts. Astute readers will notice that I actually missed a day - yesterday. By the time I was sitting down to write last night it was 8.00 pm, past the time I start my daily flexibility and mobility routines and my mind was pretty blank.

Often times these kind of 30 day challenges are introduced as a gateway to get people to change something in their lives to promote health, well being, or in some other way make their lives better. I've never been a big believer in 30 day challenges. Philosophically I believe that if you are going to change something you should commit and try until you succeed. In all likelihood any change that you institute is going to take a heck of a lot longer than a month, and in reality will most likely take the rest of your life. Sure, the new behaviour gets easier, but I'm not sure anything worthwhile ever gets easy. Sitting at the doughnut shop drinking coffee and eating sugar bombs is easy, keeping your house stocked with healthy food and never eating sugar, grains or industrial seed oils is a life time journey that you start afresh every single day.

I used to listen to a podcast back in the early, heady days before "paleo" became a trendy term and the junk food industry took over a movement that is actually about eating a species appropriate diet and moving in a species appropriate way. One of the listener questions was about "leaning out" (aka losing body fat) and the host responded in this - loosely paraphrased way - "training hard for an hour or two a day is easy compared to monitoring your what you eat and drink every hour of every day for one year and then two, three, four...." which is what is entailed in "leaning out."

In days past when we did not live surrounded by cheap, hyperpalatable foods that were mere steps away from where we sit this was not an issue, but in the modern world it is a war that the overwhelming majority of people lose. I know many people who can do really hard things for a short period of time - a few hours, a day, even a week - but simply cannot go without eating ultra-processed food (anything with more than three ingredients) - often multiple times a day.

I could have made my blog post a day challenge easier by instituting some two simple rules that I live by almost 100% of the time: If it is important do it every day and do it - whatever it is - early. Most of us have more energy in the morning and it is amazing the mental boost you get from doing the things that are important to you every day and early every day. Somehow these two simple acts seem to set the day up as a win situation.

The old dictum use it or lose it holds true for 30 day challenges or rest of your life habit changes. Doing things that are mentally and physically difficult is a constant challenge. The human body and mind wants nothing more than to sink to the level of least effort. From an evolutionary stand point this makes perfect sense and modern society, in the crazy way that we have most things upside down now, has exalted sloth, greed and gluttony so that they sit at the top of the pillar. Of course, the names have been changed and rebranded as "luxury living" and lifestyles that we all deserve, which sounds so much more elegant than a list of the seven deadly sins.

If I sound like an ascetic, by modern world standards, I would agree. I think there is value in pursuing the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance as goals in their own right. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Who among us does not strive for perfection?