y2k versus the angry victim

In the beginning of my relationship with my wife, as I may have said before, I was gracious, loving, generous, giving, hopeful, supportive and generally an amazing boyfriend.

In the years since the beginning, I basically shut down because I saw little in return for my efforts. I became bitter and lost.

Now, I'm reconnecting with the attitudes and perspectives of our early days together, and getting motivated to get in shape and take on more responsibility; to consistently make a great impression. I ran for 15 minutes today and it nearly killed me - even with LOTS of breaks. I figure if I did that every day, I'd see a nice pattern of results pretty quickly. I always shed the pounds when I ran in the past. It just blows my mind how out of shape I am.

As I pursue 'greatness' and record it in my blog here, it's clear that I've grown in a lot of ways, but now have to 'bring up the rear', and be more diligent when it comes to my various responsibilities.

The breakthroughs I've experienced recently have helped me to essentially build a "mind model" of how to remain motivated to be responsible. Moreover, unlike the past, living up to my responsibilities feels like an act of love for my family. Before, it felt like drudgery and/or a prompt for resentment and anger, which was very draining on many levels.

I now realize that a base mode of operating in a PLACE OF LOVE makes all other activities possible. In my Moving Forward post last month, I talked about a core routine of meditation, working out and vitamins. I've been praying a lot and meditating, doing pretty well with vitamins; somewhat ok in working out, but there's massive room for improvement there. By focusing on being loving versus the mind set of dealing/coping with a miserable marriage, I feel so much more empowered. And, that sense of empowerment, is helping me feel even more positive about taking care of myself and nailing my personal/ professional responsibilities, as well as those regarding my family, house and car.

I think one way to nail this might be following the way I cleaned up the yard. A couple of weeks ago, I spent an afternoon raking and bagging the massive amount of leaves left from the Fall. The clean-up revealed a lot of dead grass and bare spots in the lawn. I spent the next few evenings basically attacking the lawn, watering it, seeding and adding soil where needed. Yesterday, I saw little grass "hair" emerge from the ground. It gave me confidence that my vision of a beautiful lawn could become a reality, sooner v. later.

I really like the idea of "attacking" problems and getting little victories under my belt. I need to come up with a better day-to-day process of executing, however...