Mindful Intentionality – My 180 by 50
We crave markers of time, monuments to accomplishment. We mark time in months, years, decades, we place stone markers to mark the end of a life, we engrave monuments with words celebrating events, we celebrate and often fear, yes, fear, the annual celebration of our birth. And as the number of those years get larger, we act as if that annual celebration is something were something we could ignore, skip, delay or otherwise act as if it never occurred. We begin saying we are 29… again, as if 29 was the pivotal year when we stopped aging, stopped growing and should be forever cast in stone. And the decades that roll that first digit over to restart at zero seem to be the biggest fear of all. Starting with 30, worsening at 40, it is downright tumultuous when 50 hits. To be half-a-century! When we were children 50 was ancient. We would never be THAT old.
When I turned 28, I realized I was not going to be a member of the dead-by-27 club, but by then I was focused on living well with my wife and first child. By 29 we had 2 children, both in diapers, and I did not see the need to stay forever bound to that age, there was so much to learn. Thirty passed by barely noticed, as we focused on raising toddlers and all the devotion that requires. By 40, I declared I would not be over the hill, but rather on TOP of the hill and I convinced 9 other family members, including my wife and both children, to climb Katahdin on my birthday leading to nine of us standing together at the summit of 5,267 ft that day. We slept that night in a lean-to, roasted marshmallows and had cake for dessert. Forty did not seem too bad.
But now I approach 50, the big FIVE-OH, and the marker seems a bit more significant than any gone before, in part because of a desire to remain healthy and in part because this is a time of significant change in the family. We moved to Maine just before I turned 48 and now both children are in various stages of college and marriage, making their own family life. Then on approach to turning 49, just as I was about to spend the year watching that number nine roll over slowly into some uncharted waters, COVID19 pandemic hit. It is like when you are doing one of those trainer videos on a tread mill and the instructor or the program abruptly raises the incline without warning. What you thought was going to be easy has a little more difficulty thrown in the mix, requiring a bit more grit to get through it.
In many ways the pandemic has not adversely affected my family, aside from restricting our gatherings and bringing the children home from school. My job has continued, albeit without the extensive travel I had been doing. But not having that travel and having a forced recalibration has allowed us to take stock of the present and make conscious adjustments that otherwise might have been incidental, or perhaps not even made. In a time when there is so much outside the realm of your control, it is human nature to refocus our efforts on those things that we can control.
So as the pandemic forced us to tighten our circles and postpone our plans, and as the children arrived back home for their online classes and we wondered what damage this virus would do to us all, I began to prepare to face my fiftieth year. Because that fiftieth year begins the moment that you turn 49, and I would do so on July 23. How did I want that year to begin, what markers did I want to define to mark success? When we had moved the year before, we had Marie-Kondo’ed our physical belongings and it was a spectacular thing. As I was facing the beginning of my fiftieth year on this green ball I was ready to begin Marie-Kondoing my life.
This began with establishing a mindful meditation practice, a practice I had tried various times prior to no avail. This time I applied what I knew about establishing cadence, read through Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris and started 5-10 minutes a day. Eight months later I am up to 20 minutes a day and credit this practice for helping me stay sane in a year that should have thrown this extravert off my rocker.
The mindfulness revealed something to me however that was quite disturbing to someone who had always claimed to be a control-freak. I once had a bumper sticker that read “It’s a Control-Freak Thing: I won’t LET you understand.” I discovered that much of my previous 15 years in many aspects of my life, including work and leisure aspects, I had mostly reacted rather than been intentional about my life choices. Making decisions in the moment without regard for a larger plan. This is in part because I had achieved my career goals in my thirties, and then started Seminary seeking a new set of goals that never really materialized. Instead, I had just made in-place decisions without being guided by large goals. I think that is what most of us actually do. Life, after all “is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” Not that there is anything wrong with that approach, but it is not one I prefer to accept.
As a result, intentionality became a theme of my approach to turning 50. I would use this marker in my life as a fulcrum, a point to slingshot around and reorient the deepest rhythms in my life. As a leader in software development, I have often used cadence to help teams adjust behaviors and adapt to change, but I had only rarely tried it on myself, on my own behaviors and desired changes. That would be the first adaptation, I would begin by using my new mindfulness practice to make changes to my own self, to hack my brain and my behaviors. But no good project should be nameless, so I began to ponder what I could call this project of intentionality, this effort to hack my system, to reorient myself around this half-century marker.
I had been trying to get back to what I liked to call my “fighting weight” for years. Each year a New Year’s Resolution made and broken, but the efforts had kept my weight down at least, and had kept me active, but had not gotten me below 200 in some time. I wanted to be 180, I figured then a laudable goal would be to be “180 by 50,” and then the word play became too obvious. The theme, the name, the effort became clearer to me than it had been. Those things that I needed to change, to reorient were those things that I needed to change the heading of by 180 degrees. This would be my “180 by 50” project, of which weight loss should only be a side-effect of better intentionality.
Then I made a spreadsheet to list those items, those goals which would represent an intentional change in behaviors. These types of things are so hard to measure, but without measurement can we really know that we improve?
As 2020 had begun, I had declared it a year of “Enjoying Maine” since it would be our first full year back in my home state, and, applying the principle that you cannot improve something you do not measure had begun to track my miles hiking, hours paddling and nights in a tent. As 2020 closes, I did not meet most off my goals, but I can tell you I hiked 250 miles, spent 20 nights in a tent and paddled for more than 33 hours. Measuring them and recording those miles and nights inspired me to do more.
I began to apply the same logic to my 180 by 50 plan. Adding the weight target was easy, but it should be a side-effect of the others. I added a goal to establish a daily yoga, meditation, devotion (YMD) practice. I added goals to track and have better prioritization of my dental, physical and financial health—things which I have largely neglected while trying to do whatever it is I was doing at the moment. I added things I had always wanted to accomplish: run a 5K; Climb all Maine 4,000 foot summits; run a 10K; establish a writing cadence.
The list remains open and I continue to add to it, even now, five months into my 50th year. Some things I have accomplished, knowing that even small victories give encouragement to continue. I completed my climb of all of Maine’s 4K summits on November 28, having done six of them in the month of November. I finished my first run of a 5K on Christmas Eve, with energy to spare after! I have a regular cadence of yoga, meditation and devotion that helps direct me better than ever before.
As I regularly review my progress towards these goals I have come to realize that the steps I have taken to become more intentional and to approach this life marker of 50 years alive are simply a distillation of so many of the self-help books I have read over the years. Whether it be the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or Good to Great or Daring Greatly. It only begins with intentionality, there are serious behavior changes that need to be put in place if those intentions are to be reflected in your life. At some point, you need to take the first step up the mountain, begin that training course, put down the muffin and step away.
The first step I have discussed above somewhat, but I will call it out as Mindful Intentionality. This is where you determine WHAT you want to do, and what are they ways you need to apply motivation to yourself so that you will do them. I am motivated by checklists and plans, but what motivates you? Do you need to promise yourself a reward if you meet that goal? You have to figure out both the WHAT and the HOW. What is it that you wish to intentionally do? Perhaps pick something you can do in smaller steps so that you can celebrate those small victories. That first step is to pick a goal and decompose it into a serious of steps to get to that goal.
The secret sauce to this step is to define the HOW for you. You need to define how to “hack your self” and while there are various ways to do this, it starts with defining your motivations. If the goal is a bar that someone else defines, or some standard that you do not personally hold, you will fail to reach it. You must make the goal your own, and driven by your own personal choice, not the judgment of someone else. For example, my desire to lose weight is because I want to lessen the impact on my knees of the hiking I do. Thirty fewer pounds to carry up and down a trail is a significant motivator to lose that weight. I backpacked the north half of the 100-mile wilderness this summer to drive that motivation deep into my soul. Jim Collins suggests that we could hack our motivations by creating what he calls a personal hedgehog. (See his explanation of the hedgehog and fox in Good to Great.) This is a device to make decisions that align with your passions (i.e., you want to do it), your ability to do something well (i.e., you are good at it) and make you money or enrich your life (i.e., it is profitable).
In any case the goal of the Mindful Intentionality step is to constantly consider what you are doing and how you are motivating yourself to accomplish those goals. Part of the meditation may be to reflect on those times when your behaviors were not aligned with those goals, what was the motivation that pulled you astray, and determine if there is something you need to do to counteract that motivation the next time it occurs.
The next important ingredient is to make behavior changes on a regular rhythm. This is just accepting that humans are made to do things on a regular cadence, whether it be meals, sleeping, work, play or that new time of meditation, practicing piano, running or calorie review. Setting aside a regular time for the activity is key to ensuring it is accomplished. Schedule it on your calendar, set a reminder, and track how often you succeed at doing that activity. The key to a rhythm is to, as much as possible, do it at the same time, in the same place every day/week. The more that is the same about the actual rhythm of the activity, the better. If at first you do not seem to find adequate time for the activity, just do the shorter time in any case. Do not wait until you can find the time! Even a short period of time will give you enough encouragement to find more if it is needed. This is how my meditation went from 5-10 minutes to 15-20, I could see the value in it early and it became more important to me, important enough to find the time. This is motivation by realizing the incremental value of that activity—once you start seeing the value, you will begin to adjust your behaviors to do more of it.
But what makes us better at something is not just repetition of that activity. If all you did was spend 15 minutes daily playing guitar, you would not necessarily become a great guitarist. What is missing, the final key ingredient to lasting behavior change is reflection or retrospection. This should also be an activity you execute on a rhythm, perhaps once a week or once a month. It could be during your meditation, but it may be a more mechanical activity, not requiring as much self-reflection. In the activity of reflection you evaluate, correct and celebrate.
First you evaluate how you are doing against your goals. If it is a training program to run, how does it feel—are you stronger, can you run farther? If it is learning piano, how are you progressing, do you need a different set of lessons? Based on this evaluation you may need to correct. That is, you may need to adjust your goals, adjust your motivations, correct your food intake, adjust your schedule. Consider what it is that you need to do to help enable continual and incremental improvement in the activity.
I have always been an avid hiker, but as I pushed to climb Maine’s 4K peaks and backpacked in the 100-mile wilderness, I realized my cardio conditioning was not good enough to do what I wanted to do, so I added in goals for running to improve my cardiovascular health.
But the most important part of this reflection is the celebrate part. When you have achieved a goal, no matter how small, celebrate immediately! Bring others into the celebration, post it on social media, whatever works for you. Celebrate each small goal on the way to the big ones, because every celebration will give you a little more motivation to achieve those big goals.
When I sat atop Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine, finishing Maines 4K peaks, I sipped on some expensive scotch as I looked out over the surrounding mountains. When I completed my first 5K I rushed down to by a celebratory bottle of Green Spot Irish whiskey. Celebration is the key to hacking your brain to continue seeking the endorphins that come some accomplishing those goals. It is the fuel that will keep you going even when you are in the middle of a slog and cannot keep your rhythm. Evaluate and correct as needed, but always celebrate!
I started my fiftieth year by taking six days and backpacking the 100-mile wilderness on the Appalachian Trail. For the first time since I was married, maybe the first time ever, I was not around friends and family when the year flipped over. Instead, I awoke in a lean-to in the woods and climbed Nesuntabunt Mountain, overlooking Nahmakanta lake, miles from a paved road, trying not to step on the numerous frogs that littered the trail and trying to avoid slipping on the plentiful moose droppings left my seemingly invisible moose. I ended that day swimming in Rainbow lake, hoping for many more journeys in the woods like that one, reinforcing my plan for 180 by 50.
So now, as I prepare for the final seven months of my fiftieth year and approach the actual day on July 23 that I become a half-century old, I am seeking out companionship in this journey of transformation. For while you can celebrate victories alone, the celebration is exponentially better when it can be shared. I am looking for company to join me as I celebrate this 180 by 50 atop the Presidentials in the White Mountains sometime in late July 2021. I hope and pray that by then the worst of this pandemic is past and we can celebrate that as I enter my sixth decade.
The year 2020 will be remembered as the year of the COVID19 Pandemic, and humanity will need to learn from it to become better. We have lost loved ones, people have lost businesses, people have suffered greatly. We can all feel the deep regret that Frodo felt when you told Gandalf that “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” But the words of hope are in Gandalf’s response, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Through a Mindful Intentionality, we can all take this time as a time to reset, to review, to reflect on what we wish to keep, what we wish to cast aside and what we wish to do better in the coming year. The only one you can truly change is yourself. And do not forget to celebrate!
