>Back in the Habit

>I had to start over with my New Year’s resolutions.  If you don’t know what I mean, you may want to start here.  I was up to about day 18 when I came to a halt.  It was for a very good reason, which was that my mom came out to visit and I turned my attention to doing the bigger projects that need larger chunks of time that I don’t typically have in just the 2-hour nap window.  I told myself that I would resume counting days afterward because it wasn’t like I was sitting around on my rear end doing nothing instead of my daily habits.

But after she left, I still took a couple of extra days to get going again, and I decided that if I were going to be true to my resolution, I had to acknowledge that I’d gone more than two consecutive days without doing my habits, even if I didn’t count any of her visit.  I was pretty disappointed.  I tried to rationalize away my failed days.  I finally looked at my chart for February that was almost entirely empty, squared my shoulders, and started over.

Here we are toward the end of March, and I’m having to restart again.  There were other factors this time, but mostly it’s just that it’s really hard to keep up with every one of the habits I want to accomplish in any given day, especially if I am tired or Sebastian takes a short nap or…well, life happens.

The question now is:  Do I just keep restarting and trying again to see if I can reach this goal?  Or do I modify the goal so that I can be more successful?

I think this is a constant question in life.  I was talking last week with my mother-in-law about my struggle to continue nursing Sebastian even when he was clearly not getting enough milk and how hard it was to start the formula.  Six weeks later, I chose to cut out day feedings/pumping when I went back to work, because pumping in the closet of my classroom during a 15-min. break was making me feel insane, and I was still not producing enough milk to take away the formula anyway.  So we settled into a routine of morning and evening nursing, daytime formula.  It worked for us.  But the question that I was always considering was the same as the above:  Do I keep working on this goal, or do I modify the goal?


There are occasionally easy answers to this question.  If you’re in college, it’s usually best to plug on until you finish and get that degree.  If you’ve committed to a project at work, typically it’s a good idea to work through the difficulties and finish it, especially if people are depending on you.

But in the rest of our lives, most of this is a lot of confusion.  Is this the path, or is there another one that would be better?  There are many cliches about this issue, too, like, “You’re being too hard on yourself,” which translates to going ahead and modifying your goal.  Then there is the classic, “You can do it!  You just have to keep at it,” which of course means get back to that goal and try again.

After much thought, I’ve decided to do both.  I’m keeping my goals and the daily habits I have because I can’t figure out any one of them that feels unimportant.  My modification was to switch around the order of them a bit to try to take advantage of my most productive times of day (morning and evening) and do the easier ones during the afternoon when I tend to be most exhausted.  We’ll see how it goes.

Today is going to be Day 1.