What I want to do here is explain in some detail what the first change is all about, for my benefit and yours.

As I stated, it is Live by a Schedule. Now some of you may think the sound of that is not very appealing and wonder why anyone would want to do it. I can understand those feelings. My struggle is that I have so many things pulling me in so many directions that if I don’t organize my time I never get the things done that I want to or need to. So for me a fairly strict schedule is the solution.

Also, I find if I don’t follow a schedule and just do whatever I feel like doing I end up wasting huge amounts of time reading the newspaper or watching TV or other mindless activities. Living by a schedule will help me stay on track to meet my commitments to myself.

Living by a schedule, for me, has many benefits, not the least of which is that it will help me get to bed on time each night. Not getting to bed on time, in my estimation, is the number one thing that messes up the rest of my life. See the post Staying Up Late – Is it Worth It?

So here is my proposed daily schedule:

5:00 a.m. Get up, personal study, meditation and planning
6:00 a.m. Aerobic exercise consisting of either running or hiking
7:00 a.m. Breakfast
7:20 a.m. Shower and dress
7:50 a.m. Leave for work
8:00 a.m. Arrive at work

3:30 p.m. Begin to wrap things up at work
4:00 p.m. Leave work

10:00 p.m. Begin getting ready for bed
10:30 p.m. Lights out, go to sleep

This is the schedule I plan to live by as closely as I can each week day. For weekends it will have to be different. I’ll talk about weekends tomorrow.

There are some people who go to extraordinary lengths to take care of their car. They wash it, they wax it, they keep it tuned, they get it serviced on a regular basis and they keep everything in perfect working order. They have meticulous records of every oil change and rotation of the tires. Yet these same people neglect a much more important piece of machinery – themselves.

We see people all around us plodding along, making mediocre attempts in their jobs and their relationships. They are crippled in their attempts at success because the energy has gone out of their lives. When obstacles arise they don’t have the strength to rise above them. They are easily defeated. They go through life only half-awake!

When you burn a candle at both ends you will eventually get burned. Don’t squander and abuse the most incredible instrument you have – your body. Give it the care and attention it needs.

Shouldn’t our great aim in life be to preserve and keep our physical bodies in the best possible condition so we can experience and live life to its fullest? Why not make every occasion a great occasion? If this life is worth living then isn’t it worth living well?

In order to live life to its fullest we need to take care of ourselves both mentally and physically. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” What you think about yourself is manifested in your life and pictured in your body. If you are to make the most of yourself then you should never picture yourself as anything other than what you would actually want to be. See yourself as the person you wish to become. Your thoughts and actions are manifested in your body.

Everywhere you go you find people who are half-alive and barely awake. They resemble walking zombies rather than fully charged human beings. The world is full of them. They are the products of physical self-abuse and wrong thinking. They commit emotional suicide by killing every chance they have in life through neglect of their mind and body.

The saddest thing is to have an opportunity come our way and not be able to take advantage of it. Life passes us by because we aren’t ready to live it. We’re bogged down by poor health, fatigue, exhaustion and weariness. We’ve abused the instrument with which we live life with. When the conductor raises his baton, we are unable to join in the symphony. Our talents and gifts go unused. We are silent.

Too many of us overtax our strength and energy by pushing too hard. We live in an X-Treme world where it’s cool to push everything to the edge. We take risks. We eat too much. We stay up too late. Then we go to bed with sleep aids and wake up with the use of artificial stimulants. We have no time for true rest and relaxation. We are fooled by false economies, thinking we are saving time and accomplishing more. It’s a counterfeit sense of accomplishment. We’ve squeezed all the juice out of the fruit and are searching for more where there is none.

They say it’s a sin to be unkind to others. Isn’t it just as much a sin to be unkind to ourselves? Whatever you do in life, take care of yourself. Be good to yourself. Care for and protect your vitality, energy and strength because they are the tools with which you accomplish everything else in life. The person who does this and has no money is rich compared to the person who is wealthy and has squandered their vitality and precious energy. Whatever you do, protect and care for the most amazing machine – You!

What do I mean by that? Let me explain by using some examples.

Mastering Your Body

First let’s talk about mastering your body. When you think about the struggles that people have with their health and with their physical body, most of them have to do with too little and too much.

Of course the obvious one is too much food. There is no arguing the fact that America is suffering from an obesity problem. We eat too much. We tend to overindulge and eat far too much than we need. When you go to a restaurant and order a dinner they generally bring out enough food for two people. The portions are huge and we feel that, in order to get our money’s worth, we need to eat the whole thing. A number of times my wife and I have ordered one meal and split it between the both of us and we have left the restaurant full. There have been a number of other times when we wish we would have done that because we ended up with far too much food and left the restaurant feeling stuffed and sick to our stomachs.

It was an interesting phenomenon when I took my family to visit China for a couple of weeks. We noticed there were no obese people. We just didn’t see any fat people in China. The people weren’t starving. There wasn’t poverty. These were regular people and they were healthy. They were thin because they ate mostly vegetables and rice and they walked or rode bikes wherever they went. So you just didn’t see overweight people. It was quite shocking to come back to America and see how many overweight people there were. When you are around it all the time you don’t notice it so much but when you’ve been gone for a while and then come back – wow! There are a lot of grossly overweight people in America. We eat too much!

Let’s talk about “Too Little” with regards to our body. The problem is too little exercise. We don’t get up and move around. If I didn’t consciously make an effort every morning to get up and go hiking I wouldn’t get any exercise at all. I spend most of my days sitting at a computer, not moving much at all. I think of how many other people are in that same situation where they live a sedentary lifestyle. We walk a short distance to our car and drive everywhere we go. We would drive to the bathroom if the car would fit! We come home and sit in front of the TV or computer or Xbox. We just don’t do a lot. So we exercise too little!

Another area, as far as mastering our body goes, is in the area of sleep. I’ve noticed that this is an area that teenagers struggle with. I am familiar with a lot of youth in my neighborhood and work closely with them in a number of ways. I’m very familiar with their lifestyles. What I observe is that rarely are these youth on any kind of normal sleep schedule. It’s usually staying up way too late and existing on very little sleep and then binging on the weekends by oversleeping. They try to make up for the lost sleep during the week where they stay up until two or three or four in the morning playing video games and watching movies. Too little and too much.

Mastering Your Mind

As far as mastering our minds, what are the areas of too much and too little? I would say we have too much mental stimulation of worthless and useless things. We are bombarded with audio and visual stimulation through every imaginable means. It’s hard to find a young person now that doesn’t have a cell phone in one hand and an iPod in the other, with ear buds in their ears while watching a movie on their 120″ flat screen TV. Add to this the internet and video games and it equals too much mental stimulation. It’s like drinking a Rock Star energy drink – lots of stimulation but very little nourishment.

The too little part is too little time spent in actual thought. Too little time spent allowing our mind to be creative, allowing our mind to come up with our own ideas and thinking on our own. There is too little pondering, contemplating and studying worthwhile, thought-provoking and important information.

Mastering Your Money

What about mastering your money? I see a great imbalance in many people’s lives. They indulge too much on luxuries, toys, trinkets and time-wasters. Many feel they have to have the best of certain things whether they can afford it or not. They plunge themselves into too much debt which produces too much financial strain, tension and worry.

In the area of too little, these same people tend to put too little into savings. Too little is spent on investing. Too little of their money is contributed to society to help other people. They spend too little in supporting and caring for their family. Too little is spent on educating their minds.

Mastering Your Relationships

How about mastering relationships? I would say too much criticism goes on – too much correcting, nagging, forcing and pushing of other people. The normal result is the resistance of the person being pushed and the damaging of the relationship. The end result is usually the exact opposite of what their desired outcome was in the first place.

As far as relationships go, there is too little patience and too little love. There is too little of sitting down with the other person and just asking how their day was, of asking about their interests and what is going on in their life. There is too little of being interested in the other person, of caring about them and focusing attention on them. Too little of finding out what is going on in their head and trying to understand them.

Achieving Balance

I could go on and about too little and too much. The world is full of too little and too much. The goal is to be aware of the areas in your own life that are experiencing too little or too much and to work toward achieving balance. Balance means being steady and stable. It means not being too excessive or too restrictive but achieving true symmetry and stability in your life.

Thank you.

Master Yourself, Master Your Life

Copyright © 2009 Garold N. Larson

There are many people who have done amazing things. I don’t know about you, but I’m the type of person that gets pumped up and motivated when I learn about someone who has accomplished something remarkable. I want to write about one today.

I think someone who runs one marathon is an amazing person. I think someone who has run 50 marathons is a very amazing person. But there is one person who ran 50 marathons on 50 consecutive days in 50 American states. I think that person is an incredibly amazing person! Unbelievably, he ran his final marathon in three hours and 30 seconds. This was the New York City Marathon. To top that off he then ran back to the start of the first marathon, a distance of 1,300 miles.

This would be incredible for a person in their late twenties to accomplish, but this man is 44 years old and didn’t even begin running until he was 30 years old.

So who is this superman? He is the quiet and unassuming Dean Karnazes. He is the one that puts “Ultra” into “Ultramarathon.”

Some of his accomplishments:

• Completed a 362 mile run from the summit of Mount Kosciusko to Sydney, Australia.
• Ran a marathon at the South Pole where temperatures reached 40C below.
• Ran the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile race across Death Valley, California where temperatures reached 120 degrees.
• Competed in the US relay race, consisting of seven 200-mile long legs. The race was run by teams of 12 members but Karnazes ran it solo!

The list literally goes on and on. Search his name on Google to find out more of his story. It is amazing. I feel Dean Karnazes is an example of what the human body and mind is capable of. He is a true example of self-mastery in its highest form. When I learn about people such as Karnazes it gives me hope and motivation in my own efforts to achieve self-mastery.

Are you aware of any other individuals who have achieved high levels of self-mastery? What do you think of people like Dean Karnazes? Please share your thoughts with us.

Thank you.

Master Yourself, Master Your Life

Copyright © 2009 Garold N. Larson

However, I have found it very difficult at times to get myself out in the mornings to do a daily run. So a couple of years ago I began hiking and trail running and have since fallen in love with it. I am blessed to have a mountain with several different hiking trails within a mile or two from my home. So now my daily exercise consists mainly of hiking.

I find hiking to be so much more interesting than running on the streets. Running consists mainly of watching asphalt go by, mile after mile. Boring! Hiking and trail running, on the other hand, have so much more to offer as far as keeping it interesting. Yes, you do have to keep your eye on the trail, but you are also surrounded by nature. And nature never stays the same. It’s always changing. The transitions from each season to the next are wonderful to witness. The change from hiking in the morning daylight of summer to hiking in the dark, like I do now in the fall, is stimulating and challenging.

So, most every day I go out in the early mornings for about a half-hour hike in the foothills and canyons near my home. On Saturday mornings I go on longer hikes for about two hours in length. Here are some photos from last Saturday’s hike. The fall colors were dazzling!

This morning’s hike was marvelous. It was dark yet there was enough light from the quarter-moon to light my trail to where I didn’t need my flashlight. There were thin clouds moving quickly past the moon in the dark that were simply beautiful.

I have to admit, I didn’t feel so great this morning when I got up at 5:30 a.m. In fact I felt lousy. I was so tired and had a headache. So it took a lot of self-discipline to get myself going. I was amazed that as I went on my hike I began feeling better and better and by the time I was done I actually felt great and still do. That just goes to show you that you have to stick it out and don’t let aches and pains or fatigue stop you from your daily workout.

Have a great day!

Copyright © 2009 Garold N. Larson