One tiny decision at a time
I started running recently.
If you don’t know me, that may sound like a normal life update. If you do know me, I hope you didn’t get hurt falling out of your chair.
It’s just that I am a consummate indoorsman. I like video games and reading and chess and Netflix and curling up on my couch. What these all have in common is that they’re comfortable and require very little physical movement.
They also burn roughly zero calories and do nothing to raise my energy level, which resemble that of the couch. Two ideas helped me break free a little bit from my sedentary life: some words from my wife (who, unlike some politicians, is not interested in couches in that way) and a memory of a lesson from my therapist.
My therapist (the one I had in Chicago) and I accomplished one concrete thing in our almost 2 years working together: I started drinking more water.
I know wording it that way makes it sound like mental health malpractice, but honestly I’m grateful for the water thing. It was near the end of our time working together, and I was talking about my poor health decisions. He asked me if I could think of a small step that would be healthy. One small enough that I could do it consistently and more or less permanently. The one I thought of was drinking more water.
So every day I made sure to have at least one liter of water. (Sparkling, obviously, because I’m not a yahoo.) This step was small enough for me to build into my life, and now drinking water is just a part of my daily rhythms. Did it magically make me a paragon of health? No, but I vaguely believe all the experts who say it’s good to drink water!
Fast forward to my wife suggesting I be less couch-like. I thought back to my therapist’s question: what’s one small step I can take, with consistency?
You’d better believe that step was NOT running. God, running is the worst. It’s horrible. I can’t just build running into my life when it feels like (I’m speculating here) being eaten by a T-Rex.
The step I thought was small enough to do, which might get me a bit more active and energetic, was taking a walk every (week)day. It has been easy enough for me to wake up a little earlier and walk a 1.5-mile loop next to my house. It is not only easy, it has paid immediate dividends: I start each work day showered, fully alert, coffee in hand, rather than just-rolled-out-of-bed and coffee in hand.
The running part isn’t really important. The above story was the point. But I will tack on that one small decision, once it’s implemented, can lead to further small, incremental changes. I never planned to run a single step, but eventually I started to layer some intervals of jogging into my walks, mainly to see if I could do it (the first one was ROUGH but since then it’s been pretty fine).
The final thought to tack on is this: this same slow, small, experimental approach to change can be utilized in our spiritual lives. I remember ruefully my approach to transformation (“sanctification”) when I was evangelical. While all credit and glory would go to the Holy Spirit, the change would only come if I studied the Bible daily, prayed fervently, confessed my sins, shared my faith, etc etc. There was so much pressure to adopt a full-on lifestyle of practices and disciplines, basically overnight. Plus it was prescribed which things I needed to do.
Instead of following a prescription, we might ask ourselves which practices could be life-giving ones to explore. Then we can choose one—one small, doable step. It might turn out we were wrong and that particular activity isn’t drawing us closer to the divine. That’s okay, we can think of another small step. Maybe one will stick, and we will slowly build upon it in unknown directions.
Whatever steps we each choose, it is exciting to be on this journey together. Because while it’s good to pursue physical energy and health, I think it’s even more important to pursue Love.
