We All Have Ruts | BlogFromTheBelly4

There is this circle cycle I get stuck in where I fall out of my healthy patterns and fall onto the couch, night after night, watching episodes of lazy sitcoms after work until bedtime. I think it coincides with the end of a sunny weather spell that moves into days of cloudiness, but that may just be my way to identify a reason other than myself for this circular cycle I tend to repeat. If you’re following this blog, note that I’m posting this on Monday when I really intended to post something new every weekend. Procrastination…sitcoms…

I assume there are probably many of us that can relate to this sort of thing. If you don’t want to read all about my current frustrations, skip to the last half of this post where I get to what I know I should be doing instead of laying on the couch like a beached whale. (That’s actually really a sad situation, for whales and also for people who are metaphorically stuck like that).

When I am keeping up with my healthy patterns it looks like this: staying on track with my She Reads Truth “Bible in a Year” plan on my phone app, keeping clutter in the house at a minimum, going outside for walks several times a week, painting instead of watching TV, not eating all the sweets in the house in two days, doing all of our weekly meal prep on Sundays without complaining the whole way through, etc.

When I fall into the couch/sitcom pattern it looks like this: falling behind on my Bible reading plan (currently I am about…14 days behind…which pattern do you think I’m currently sitting in?), letting the house get decently messy – even skipping my weekly cleaning all together and letting it go two weeks, making back to back batches of cookies since I’m spending more time at home and want to have cookies on hand at all times, constantly thinking “I should catch up on my reading…but I could just really hammer it out tomorrow and catch up, yeah I’ll just flop onto the couch and think about it tomorrow” (spoiler alert, I won’t do it tomorrow either), think about painting and decide it’s too much work – flop on the couch instead. Basically I think about the variety of things I should/could do with my time and I then decide to just flop on the couch instead. (Just so you all know, I realize that if we are fortunate enough to have children someday…my cleaning habits will change drastically. I know cleaning every other week vs. weekly can be totally normal or more often than some are able. That’s just where I’m at right now.)

Notice how neither of the patterns include or leave out a healthy exercise routine. That’s because…I don’t have one! I loathe working out, lifting weights, etc. I do enjoy yoga, but even that has been a challenge for the last…well it’s been over a year since I’ve had a regular yoga routine.

My obstacles are my priorities. In my mind, I need the house to be clean and things to be in order before I will feel mentally able to sit down and read, sit down and paint, or do those things I really enjoy once I get started. If I don’t feel like cleaning the house, I can forget about getting to that point where I can allow myself to do those other things. 

So it’s an endless cycle. There’s a sunny day, the windows are open, I’ve cleaned the house, I sit and read, I decide to go paint, I have a great day. The clouds roll in (or nothing specific instigates a change), I fall off my healthy routine wagon and into the couch potato pattern, I wait it out until inspiration strikes again and I can get back to my healthy tasks. 

Some of the ebbing and flowing just comes with being human. We can’t all be at our best all the time, but…here’s what I think, and know, I should be doing instead of what I’m doing: 

I need to find a way to put praying and reading above the other things. So instead of cleaning being my obstacle, I get to the point where I put things like that on the back burner until I’ve spent time reading God’s word and praying. God’s word needs to be the “obstacle” that I feel I must spend time with before I feel mentally able to do anything else. Painting needs to be the “obstacle” I feel I must spend some time on before I turn on the TV and melt into the sofa.

So there you have it, the latest edition of “what’s on my mind this week.” Using my time in ways that give more acknowledgement to the value of the time God has given me. Please pray for me to improve on these things I KNOW are only good for me. I’ll pray for you too, whatever your ruts may be. Let’s all just pray for each other on this topic, among many others, all the time – but especially right now when many are home so much or feel like their routines have been really thrown off. 

We all struggle and not all of us have been able to use this quarantine time to develop a life-changing workout routine, scrub everything down to the baseboards in our homes, calculate and perfect our combination of caffeine/vitamins/supplements/zen meditation, and create a new, super beneficial life routine. There are those of us (me) over here trying to perfect the art of eating a bowl of buttery popcorn/snuggling the cats/not letting the cats get any popcorn/finding a good time to go to the bathroom when my cat is all snuggled up on my lap. All the while still thinking about all those things I should be doing…

Do you have a rut you’re currently in or one you have successfully defeated? Let this community know about it. Comment and share those stories, they might help someone!