Tag: pbs

Update: 25 Minutes a Day – Reward Yourself

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Sooo….

Awhile ago I published a post about taking 25minutes out of your day to exercise. You can walk, run, swim, or move your leg back and forth. You can carry the baby around or substitute chores that require electronics (like the washing machine) by doing them by hand. I also mentioned that I will do more posts on updates and such. So here’s what I did today:

  • Sean T25: Alpha Cardio (includes, sprints, jumping jacks, etch.)
  • Breakfast (after workout): 1 Banana, Strawberry Parfait Smoothie, Water (I’m not a very big breakfast eater which I heard is bad but whatever lol).

What I want to do today is talk about rewarding yourself and using that as a catalyst to workout more. The hardest part of any workout, at least for me, is not starting, but starting back up again after you have already started. I took a two week hiatus and today was my first day back (it was supposed to be yesterday). Once you get it going it’s good but when you stop that’s the struggle. But while shopping for food I discovered a fun way to both discipline and reward yourself to help stay motivated. Get yourself a healthy treat and restrict yourself from eating it until AFTER you workout. If you cheat on yourself, POST ABOUT IT. Let the world know you messed up so you can get that encouragement from your peers for next time. We often look at mistakes as a bad thing and are told to keep our faults hidden, but the truth is that exposing the negative gives way to the positive. The struggles we have are hard to change because we have not admitted to the problem, we have not exposed the issue so it remains an issue. As the old folk say, “Tell the truth, shame the devil.” So my admittance is that I stopped working out for about two weeks, and my treat of choice was the parfait smoothie. As soon as I bought it (since I happen to love smoothies) I wanted to devour it! I kept going to the refrigerator to look at it and it was just calling my name. BUT, I told myself that I couldn’t drink it until AFTER I worked out. So as a punishment, since I didn’t workout yesterday I couldn’t drink it. Instead, I held out until today after my workout and it was sooo good! This was my treat for having stuck to what I said I would do and to admitting where I faulted.

Encoded

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Certain memories won’t let you forget
they rush before the forefront of your mind
like messages that escaped the past
only to cement themselves inside you
climb their way through blood vessels
encoded experiences written in our DNA
for thoughts do not disappear
do not evaporate from the mind
only to fall short in the abyss of nothingness
they’re instead a strand of silent data
entwined within the past and the present that is you
and sometimes, the future too
encoded memories
they erupt old wounds like falling planes
in smoke filled clouds
a twin tower sacrifice for your humility
a taste of truth for our memories
a thorn in the side
encoded data
so we never forget what falling feels like.

Nostalgia

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I didn’t always drink coffee, but the first cup was so delicious, made with the expertise of a veteran coffee drinker some years back, that I incorporated caffeine into my daily schedule and like a feign sought to mimic it’s deliciousness. But this morning, as I poured the warm goodness and integrated it with Carmel Vanilla Cream, something unexpected happened. Ok so yes I was thinking about Blogging but not that. I was, however, brought back to those early days. Suddenly, I tasted of the past and images hurried to my thoughts like a wave of epiphany. With each sip it is as if I tasted of conversation and laughed at jokes once long faded away in memory. It reminded me of an article I read last week about scientist finally admitting that memory is stored in the DNA, and I do believe it’s true. Even if we cannot remember a moment, I believe we still live it in some way. Maybe we mimic the actions of what we can neither speak nor recall. Maybe something makes us laugh and we cannot explain why. Or perhaps there was an experience so traumatic that it disintegrated into our very skin, but is no longer accessible through the mind. Why is it that when we recall the past we include ourselves even if we had not lived it? “We were slaves” I say of my history, though I have never been anyone’s property and neither have I picked of anyone’s cotton. Could it be that this experience was genetically passed on to me? Indeed, I believe so. For who am I to be so arrogant as to believe I inherited my mother’s nose and not my ancestors ways? Their thoughts? Their promises?

Memory, like water it is an interesting thing. A substance that we use daily, that we cannot live without, and that we have even named and yet, we know nothing about it. For what is H2O really? I laugh at the boldness of man to think he has all the answers, and yet the things we use on a daily basis is still foreign to us. So, Nostalgia, the bringing forth of memory we either despise or long to experience again, perhaps it is much deeper than we think, and yet closer too.

In The News: A real “Beyond The Colored Line” Situation Arises

Race of Rachel Dolezal, head of Spokane NAACP, comes under question

(CNN) The race of one of the most prominent faces in Spokane, Washington’s black community is under question after her estranged mother claimed she is white but is “being dishonest and deceptive with her identity.”

Rachel Dolezal, 37, is the head of the local chapter of the NAACP and has identified herself as at least partly African-American. But her Montana birth certificate says she was born to two Caucasian parents, according to that couple, which shared that document and old photos with CNN.

“We are her birth parents,” Lawrence Dolezal told CNN on Friday. “We do not understand why she feels it’s necessary to misrepresent her ethnicity.”

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