A little over a year back, one day I decided I wanted to do something that’d count as exercise. Well the decision made itself. I was lifting Aadya kanna out of the bathtub and felt my back all of a sudden come to terms with my age. Having decided that I owed it my girl and myself to be healthy for as long as I can, the next step was to decide on the how.
I’ve always admired runners and always been sure that I couldn’t be one. But running – especially running outside is an easy first step. To start with, you need minimal gear(psa: this changes really quickly), you can do it at anytime of the day and you’d expect not to need an instructor to get started.
The arguments were very convincing and so December 2019, I stepped out for my very first ‘run’. I ran that day as if it was the last time I’d ever run. And in all probability it’d have been my last had I not signed up for a run bet. Knowing my inability to stick it out, I had put $40 into a pot and committed to running 4 times a week to win it back. Now there was money at stake. So the next day I ran again. And I did it every week that followed. I won $40 back and then signed up for another bet and another and another. Until one day, I realized I was no longer running to win the money back. I was running longer and had goals completely outside of the ‘simple’ bets that got me started. I realized running had become a ritual. Sometime in May 2020, I decided I’d run every day – even if it was just a mile. The bar was deliberately low – low enough to make it really easy to do. And this more than anything is what cemented running as ritual for me.
There is something that sets rituals apart from habits. Unlike habits which maybe something we fall into, rituals demand our purposeful focus. And that is what running has become for me. It is no longer a question of if I’ll go running today but rather when I will go running today and for how long. In the last year, I’ve run close to 300 days this year. This has also meant that I’ve spent at least 10 minutes outside every one of those days. For a person who has gone several weeks without stepping outside the house, this has been a sea change. And this one single ritual has had ripple effects in the rest of my life. It has given me time to step away from the hustle of daily life and think. It has allowed me to discover new podcasts and ideas and music that I otherwise would not be able to carve out time for. It has also helped me to find a renewed sense of purpose.
So this year, I’m trying to find comfort in a new ritual. The ritual of writing. I’m planning to write for 10- mins every day. Within the very first week I’ve come to realize how much more difficult this is. 10 minutes of writing is the last step of a process of cataloging topics I can write about and then deciding on the topic of the day through a process of elimination. Especially on topics of public policy, where there has to be research, 10 minutes is what it takes to find the first study. But the hope, as I discovered with running, is that small efforts will add up to big outcomes over time. Writing has helped to crystalize so much of my thought process – in life and public policy. So, even when I know that there may not be a blog post at the end of every day of following this ritual, I still know that at the end of it – I’ll be far ahead of where I’m now.