The Weight of Water

On occasion, I'll get these little spurts of enthusiasm and motivation, and I will conciously try and change something about my life that I don't really like or that's bringing me down. More often than not, these spurts will last for a week or two and then fizzle out in a mire of laziness and apathy. I am notorious for starting projects with great, lofty visions of success only to lose interest shortly thereafter. In a word, I am not known for my follow-through technique.

However, amidst yet another glorious burst of optimism, I have decided that I want to change that about myself; to change the very thing about me that prevents me from making changes in my life, and if that doesn't have a little ring of the Zen to it, I don't know what does. The conclusion I came to is that I always try to change either too big of a thing, or too much at once, and wind up getting myself stressed out and overwhelmed, which then casues me to give up. So I'm trying to break things up into bite size morsels, do it by starting with just one thing and going from there.

So the thing that is going to kick off this amazing journey of transformation and self-improvement, the goal I have chosen for myself as the symbolic first step in this new road of positive personal action, is this:



That's right. A water bottle. One that has measurements up the side going up to 32 oz (mine is green though). If I drink two of these a day, I will be drinking the medically recommended minimum daily amount of water to keep me healthy, strong and (this is the important one) alive. I also imagine it has something to do with helping to keep my various soft insides well lubricated and in vital organ-juice producing peak form, but I don't really know. I am, after all, not a doctor. I work mainly on conjecture and gossip.

My logic (such as it is) is this: if I can change just one habit of mine for the better, if I can make ingesting 64 oz of water daily a habit that I don't even need to think about, then who knows what other healthy and beneficial changes I might be able to trick myself into? Why, I might be able to train myself to take stairs more often instead of escalators, or to maybe take a daily walk around the block and the weather be damned, or even sock $5 a week into a savings account or something. Who knows? The possibilities are endless! And all because I decided to drink more water.

I have taken to carrying it with me pretty much eveywhere. Filling it up is the last thing I do in the morning before I go to work, and it's always sitting close at hand on my desk once I get there. However, that bottle is deceptively small. I have been having trouble being able to actually swallow 64 oz of water in the course of a day. That's a whole lotta water. But I keep plugging away at it. I figure it's similar to learning how to run long distances. You run until you can't run anymore, and then just go one or two more steps farther every time. I think in the 3 or so weeks I've been doing this, I've managed to drink my goal only once or twice, although I'm well on my way to getting there today. With any luck, I'll be able to drink 64 oz without flinching in a couple more weeks. Then I can move onto my next goal, which is TBD. I know you'll stay tuned. And I am, as my friends already know all too well, open to suggestion.