Where Nike and Yoga Meet: Just Do It

The topic of the month at The Samarya Center is shaucha (cleanliness or purity). This week, I have been thinking about the shaucha of not procrastinating. For instance, we have one of those pet fountains at our place, which I think is great and I hate to clean. Today, I looked at it and thought that it needed cleaning and just did it right then. It turned out, as it often does when I do things I “hate,” that once I was doing it, it really wasn’t that bad. And then I get that good feeling that comes with having done something that needed doing. When I am able to follow through on things like that, my mind-clutter definitely seems reduced—all the conversation about how I should do it, but I don’t want to, all the internal nagging is gone. Ahh, shaucha.

Something else that has been on mind is the fact that the Seattle to Portland bike ride is this weekend. My husband will be riding it (in one day!) for the second time. Last year after he did it, I decided I would like to do it this year (but in two days). Then, toward the end of the summer, I had an idea for a book and I got very excited about it. I started on it right away before the motivation passed and became more mind-clutter. Sometime in December, it dawned on me that it wasn’t realistic to work on the book and train for the STP at the same time—both would require a lot of time on my days off. I chose the book. And ended up doing neither.

Now I won’t say that I haven’t spent any time feeling bad about that (for more on feeling bad, see the last post), but I’m over that now—that’s what happened. But I am curious about how it happened. Here’s a brief synopsis: Early in the year, I lost momentum with the book—to be expected, I imagine, with a big project, energy and optimism ebbs and flows. Writing then became a “have-to,” which makes it considerably less likely to happen. When the weather started getting better (which was a non-linear progression this year in Seattle), I started having these internal battles between riding my bike and writing my book. Often, I would try to write first, because that was what I chose as my project (I had to), while simultaneously thinking both that I wanted to go on a ride and that I should go on a ride. I wouldn’t be making much progress on the writing and would wait so long to go on the ride that I wouldn’t have time or the weather would change. Eventually, I didn’t bother even going into the folder on my computer with all of the book-related stuff and by then I all I could think about was how out-of-shape I was and how hard it was going to be to ride my bike.

Basically, the mind-clutter was piled high. All sorts of lies and useless nonsense like making riding and writing an either/or, the shoulds, the procrastination rationalizations. Sorting that out is interesting, but when I look at the whole process, it seems to me that all the conversation, regardless of the exact content, was the thing that caused the suffering of inactivity. Which brings us back around to my original point about shaucha. If I want to create more clarity and cleanliness in my mind, then I can just do something instead of thinking and talking about it. It seems that as soon as I start “trying to decide” what to do, I may very well not end up doing anything. All of the debating and persuading and arguing does not create clarity of purpose or intention, it just creates mind-clutter and serves to keep me paralyzed.

I’ll end my story by sharing about my day today. I had committed to myself that I would work on the book because I wanted to, so I spent a couple of fairly productive hours on that and enjoyed it. Then I had a pause and looked up and saw how beautiful the day was and thought I’d go for a ride around the lake, so I got up, got ready and headed out. I can spend a lot of time on a ride with my mind-clutter, but I didn’t debate whether or not I’d go around the lake, I just went. And I didn’t look at my little gauge to see how fast or slow I was going, how far I’d gone, how long I’d been riding, I just rode. Ahh, shaucha.