Progress or no progress?
The path in life is not always straight: it can curve left and right, up and down. You never truly know what's coming next.
It is always a challenge to start something new, but it's harder to keep going when it's no longer new, fun and shiny. The process you go through to learn is changing you to become better ideally. You change. It can modify you internally and externally, for better or worse.
In order to see if there's a difference and if you're heading in the right direction, you have to ask a lot of questions, both to others and yourself, so you can understand if you're making progress. You could be doing the same exercise all your life, but if you're doing it wrong, you won't get the results you're expecting. Doing pushups won't necessarily give you stronger legs.
Knowing if you're making progress is not always clear and you might get discouraged before it can even start to pay off. I was doing some exercises a few times a week for the past 5 years. It helped me so far, but I got lost along the way and stopped caring, stopped understanding the reasons why I did it. So I quit. I did that not because I couldn't continue, but it now felt like wasted time: I didn't see results fast enough. But the thing is, in order to see those results you're seeking, you need to put in the work. I wasn't. Either you see the light at the end of the tunnel or you don't. And when you can't see it, you either try and find it or you don't.
Don't get me wrong, quitting is not always bad. In fact, it can be the best thing you do in life sometimes. The reason behind quitting matters more: do you feel what you've been pursuing all this time no longer make sense to you? Do you see it as superfluous? Do you see the benefit from removing this from your life? Or are you simply not willing to put more efforts into it? Whatever the reason, you have to understand the "why" behind it. You need to dissect it and really see what's pushing you to move in that direction.
None of that is necessarily easy, on the short or long term, but you have to make a decision based on your observation. To truly observe, you have to see things as they are and not lie to yourself: you can't pretend it's for your own good when it's really not and you know it. Fooling yourself only makes things harder.
It's not about being stubborn and never quit or change the way we work or think, but we have to be reasonable about it. Reason-able.
As for my workout routine, I have to ask myself again why I do it. If it's to look good, although it's fine to think that, it might not be as strong as doing it to be able to appreciate the present moment more and not simply be wheezing as I climb the stairs. Extrinsic motivations, the external factors pushing you to act, are not necessarily as effective as intrinsic ones: for starters, what others think doesn't matter, you have to do this for you first. The motivation itself can't help you either if whenever you feel down, it's not helping you go up that hill.
Doing what we do for the wrong reasons will not yield the results we're waiting for because we have high expectations of an outcome that might never happen.
Expectations are most often the liars here: we put a value too high on something we often can't control and we're disappointed because it didn't go according to the "perfect" plan we had envisioned. Doing our best and observing while letting go of any outcome is what we can practice more.
What do you think?