Achieve and maintain. That is my newest motto in my life. From my talks with many my age, people have problems doing those actions. Well most have problems with the maintaining part. I have learned through my life that many things are easy (or at least were easy) to achieve. So if it is so easy to achieve why spend time maintaining it. When I need it, I'll just re-achieve it. So many of us spend our lives in the up and down struggles of life.
To simplify the concept lets look at this from the perspective of house-cleaning. For those of you who have been in it, you know my place is a mess most of the time. Bottles of beer and sodas all over the place, piles of un-opened mail, clothes whereever I decided to take them off; you know, the typical dirty bachelor. Occasionally I have attained a form of cleanliness in the place, usually before big parties and company coming over. Ok this is not the highest form but a major improvement over the current state. But a couple weeks go by and it is back to pig-sty madness. Then I need to I'll clean it up again from scratch.
Now there are a couple problems with this ebb-tide way of doing things besides the obvious slob label. One, I never reach the higher levels of cleanliness when it comes to my apartment. Why? Because I am always starting at ground zero. But if I maintained in between my few cleaning spurts I would be starting at a higher level. Sure maybe by maintaining I dip a little but not as much. Imagine this in graph form.
The second problem, with the achieve and re-achieve method would be that, in this example I am only prepared to let say entertain guests at certain times. If a surprise comes along, someone knocks on the door unexpectedly, chances are I would be below the "semi-clean not embarrasing stage". Of course the other method may require a little spike in effort if someone comes over unexpectedly but that would only be because you would now hold yourself to a higher standard.
You see the human body follows the achieve and re-achieve method. Use it or lose it. If you aren't going to kick over your head anymore than the body thinks why the hell should I put any effort into maintaining these nicely stretched muscles. Perhaps that is why it is so natural for people to follow that progression. If the body follows it, than so should I. What the body actually is saying is if he doesn't care why should I. If he is not going to put any effort in this I am certainly not. I have come to realize this natural axiom is used in so many areas of life. Be it the relationship of living space to man, man to body, lover to lover, boss to employee, parent to child, wherever you look the natural progression of "if they don't care i don't care" is there. This natural concept is one of the downfalls of many areas.
As human beings we have the innate ability to conquer natural concepts. Many have conquered those natural enviromental concepts, cold, heat, water, air, gravity, in some way shape or form. Some people have even conquered internal concepts such as lust, fear, greed. We have to overcome this natural "axiom" of apathy. It is easy to give in and say it is a natural process; It would be simple to blame everything on someone else; It would be effortless to put yourself into the role of I don't care because he doesn't. But the only way the cycle stops is by a conscience effort internally. We do it because it is the right thing to do not because no one else will care. If each of us looks into ourselves and starts the achieve and maintain cycle and translates that into every area of life, no matter how small or large, we can attain the highest levels individually and as a species.
Sorry kinda got on my ole soap box there. I have been known to ramble in my thoughts from time to time. That previous paragraph was about to explode into how each of our achievements in each area should be applied to all other areas, but I think I will save that for another day. So lets go back to achieve maintain in relation to me.
So now that I have devoted myself to that concept, I get into the area of actually maintaining. All this was easy to talk about. All this is hard to do. Beating nature usually is. It takes self-discipline, something I tend to lack. I am going to start by the old standby of organizing and scheduling. For everything I have achieved I need to schedule time to maintain it. The ever-present to-do list is going to get longer. Of course I will have to schedule very specific tasks. I am sure to fail, if on my list I have "Clean Apartment" for days 1 and 2 and "Maintain Clean Apartment" for days 3-14. If I dissect the process of achieveing and maintaining it will become more clear. If I write down on my "to clean" list every possible detail, pick-up and wash clothes lying around, go through mail, vacuum, clean up trash clutter, etc etc etc. and I use this list to clean and then I use this list daily to maintain, I have a chance of success. Ok, ok, so you don't want to scrub the toilet or clean the windows daily. I understand. Trust me! So I decide to schedule them weekly. Somethings you can do that with. Just don't do let too much time fall in between or your back in the achieve re-achieve cycle. Most of the things you should put some effort into daily. I think tomorrow on this web-log I will list some of the areas and specifics I plan to evaluate and start using my new motto.
Till tomorrow,
Leo 4
30 November 2004
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