Living for today

This past weekend I was blessed enough to spend some time with this man.  

The picture is fuzzy, but it doesn't matter, because at least I have it.  Hopefully I will be able to collect a few more, but life changes in a instant and nothing is guaranteed.  This is my cousin Mike.  He is just 5 months older than me and spent a lot of time harassing me in my youth.  This past summer he was diagnosed with ALS.  He is not going to have many more birthdays, so he has chosen to make the most of everyone he has left.  

We road tripped down to Chicago and spent a wonderful night laughing and singing with our cousins, our first friends.  We made plans to do it again.  The girls already have a date on the calendar.  We laughed about how we have aged and what we remember about our youth.  Some remembered more than others.  Some may have been under the influence and maybe didn't remember Saturday night on Sunday morning.  I hugged my uncle, thinking about how he is going to watch his child leave him for ever.  

I am trying to use Mike's attitude to remind me that life is about more than a clean house.  It doesn't matter that everything is put back where it is supposed to be.  

What is your goal?

If you want to do something, you have never done before, start by setting a goal.  Goals should be achievable but still require a bit of effort. I like short term goals.  Sometimes my goals seem silly. One of my goals is to stop drinking diet pop. To get there I set little goals.  I will only have a pop three days out of the week.  When there are days that I think I can't go without, I set a goal to first drink two bottles of water before I have a pop.  By bottles I mean two 32 oz. bottles.

I do the same thing when I am exercising or running.  When I first started running, I could run for about 2 blocks before I thought I was going to have a heart attack.  I slowly worked myself up to a mile over the course of several weeks. I was stuck at a mile for almost a year.

At the time I happened to be going to a Nurse Practitioner, who was also a runner, and I told her how frustrated I was that I couldn't go any farther. Karen told me it was all in my head.  Running is a mental and physical challenge.  That conversation was actually life changing for me.  It didn't tell me how I was going to do it, just that I could do it.  The next time I went out for a run I started setting goals.  Lots of them.  Every single time I went out to run.  I would set goals to run my mile and then run another block and then I could walk the next block. I would run a block, walk a block, run a block walk a block.  Then the next week I would say okay today I can run two blocks, walk one block and on an on.

So what is your goal?  To walk the 5K, to jog the 5K, to jog/walk the 5K, to not come in last.  That is always my goal.  I have actually run two races where I was last, dead last.

I saw this on a t-shirt on Pinterest:

I run
I may be slower than a heard of turtles running through peanut butter,
but I run.

PS. when I say I run, that is sort of an exaggeration, I am more of a jogger and I am definitely a walker/jogger.