I got a free three-month pass to the gym, so I’ve been going a couple times a week and doing the elliptical or treadmill or something. I’ve settled on 45 minutes as a good amount of time—not so long that it makes it hard to go, but long enough to make it “worth the trip.” Sometimes I don’t feel like staying for 45-minutes, it seems long and boring and I’m ready to get on to the next thing. But if I was planning on forty-five minutes, I encourage myself to stick with it and always feel good that I did. I have made a couple daily commitments for the month of December that are really showing me that promising myself I’m going to do something and then doing it feels really good. In fact, I don’t even think it matters what the commitment is—it really could be anything.
There are some days that I do my 45 minutes and I feel like doing more, which seems like a good idea, right? I’m not so sure. It’s a sneaky way of raising the standard, so that “just” following through on my commitment starts to be not good enough. And it also sets the stage to undermine the whole idea of commitment by moving my decision-making back to what I “feel” like doing. If it’s okay for me to stay longer at the gym on the days I feel like it, then it will likely start to be okay for me to cut my time short on the days I feel like it. I can imagine even making deals with myself—I leave ten minutes early today and stay ten extra minutes another day. Pretty soon the whole thing has gone out the window.
I caught on to this whole trick because today I had to convince myself to stay and then when it was almost time to go, I found myself beginning to debate about staying longer. But when I paid attention to how I was feeling, there wasn’t really a big difference—it wasn’t like I had hit my zone and was having a great time. It made me think that it’s the same internal process, just flipped around.
Now, the thing is that, of course, whatever I do is okay really—it doesn’t matter if I go to the gym at all. AND if I have a sense that it helps take care of me and commit to doing it, then whether or not I follow through does make a difference. I either learn that I can trust myself or that I can’t trust myself.
The topic of the month at Samarya is ishvara pranidhana—surrender or devotion to God. Keeping commitments would seem to most easily fit into the category of tapas or effort (and I probably did write about it that way recently). I think it also is a practice of surrender—surrendering the small “s” self, the momentary desires and dislikes of the ego, in order to serve something bigger. A commitment to go to the gym may not seem like “something bigger,” but what I’m talking about is a commitment to keep commitments, a commitment to be guided by the part of me that can see the big picture instead of by an endless conversation about what I “feel” like doing, a commitment to developing a relationship with something that is closer to the big “s” Self than the small “s” self.
