All You Need is Love

When I give myself a physical challenge, the same old self-involved, mental struggle rears its head.  This mental struggle can only be coughed up as my ego taking a heavy pounding.  But as Lance Armstrong once said: “Pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever”. So this past weekend while riding my first century, I dug deep and finished.

Still, while I was complaining for the hundredth time on Sunday that my shoulder/back/ass/knee/stomach hurt, in another part of the world people were grieving. Over the past weekend while I was feeling sorry for myself, Norway was mourning an unimaginable loss. At the time I was riding, I hadn’t heard the news of the Norway massacre. If I had, maybe I would have gone a little easier on myself.

It’s difficult for me to keep things in prospective sometimes.  My ego thinks it’s a big deal, but big deals hit you when you least expect them. True pain and grief can’t be found on a highway shoulder. True grief comes when hate rules.

My heart goes out to the people of Norway.   I can only hope we can keep our faith in humanity and remember Yoga’s first Yama: Ahimsa or non-violence. Whether its to ourselves or someone else, be nice to each other, will ya?

“Our answer is more democracy, more openness, and more humanity – but never naivety.” – Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg

(WOLFGANG RATTAY/REUTERS)

In the “Red Light” Zone

It’s officially true. I suck at time management.

I’ve feared this for some time now, knowing deep in my gut that I had a serious problem.  I recently took a quiz that clearly proved my worse fears.  The quiz was created by the lovely Susi Hately from Functional Synergy to determine a person’s time management skills. Susi offers useful and eye opening business courses and resources geared specifically to yoga entrepreneurs.  This time the eye opener was my score on her time management quiz.

You the know kind: a quick ten item questionnaire where you rank your answers from 0-10, 0 being “I’m so far off the deep end on this item I’m drowning” to 10 being “I rule the school”.   Add up your scores and voilà, you get a score on how proficient you are at time management.

If you do the math, the highest score you can attain is 100. The lowest score is a big fat zero.

Susi provides an overall ranking of how you did with a score of less than 50  being what she calls the dreaded “‘Red light zone’: You’ll want to make some changes quickly or you will continue to struggle.”

My score? 27.

Good. Lord.

To Susi: No, the writing of this blog was not pre-scheduled into my day.  But it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

The irony here is palpable.

Now, what was I supposed to be doing…?