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The Effort to Change

I find habits hard to make. Well, at least good habits.

I am naturally a very lazy person. This surprises a lot of people when I tell them. I used to have goats and gardens and chickens and horses and dogs, and so many things that took up time in my day. I'd milk the goats and make cheese, I'd walk the dogs down at the river. I'd weed and weed and weed and weed the acre of gardens I tended. But I'm still a lazy bones Jones, as my mum used to say.

Just because I am a lazy person, doesn't mean that I behave like one. All it means is that if I don't push myself, I would sit around and do not very much by default. However, I have things I want to do, so therein lies a conundrum. The logical and inescapable truth is I will have to build good habits to counteract my inner couch potato. 

You can understand how being lazy leads to bad financial habits. I'm too lazy to make dinner, so I'll just get takeout. I'm too lazy to track what I spend, so I assume that I'm doing alright so I don't have to put in the effort to change. I think that's really the core of it. The effort to change. An object at rest will stay at rest unless an outside force acts upon it. An example of Newton's First Law of Motion, and the reason that if I don't have anything pressing to do, I'll probably be watching a favourite movie or playing a favourite video game.

But I digress. 

I have already taken steps to build better financial habits, such as finally creating a budget! Currently, my battle is against the roly-poly pizza pop loving woman inside, the one who doesn't really care if we stay physically fit. I'm almost 29, and I know it is easier to maintain a physical fitness than to build it from zero.


Enter yoga!

My guy and I have been trying to do yoga every day. We started about two months ago, and for three weeks we did it every day, except one. Then a long weekend came around involving turkey and wine, and we fell out of the habit. Now we've decided to add some weight training three days to the schedule of every day yoga. Ugh.

So far, we haven't been perfect in our practice, but it's only been one week with the weights addition, and I've managed to get sore arms a couple of times. There are nights where I come home from work and I really don't want to do yoga, but he makes me, then nights when he doesn't, and I make him. It's much easier for me to do it with a partner, or else my lazy mind whispers in my ear, "you could be sitting and having a cup of tea...." Insidious; I love tea....

I think this first hurtle of habit-making will lead to others, and as they begin to pile up more and more, I will seem less and less like a lazy person. And perhaps one day when I have a leisure to decide what I want to do every day instead of work, I'll have many excellent habits for fall back on.

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