Setbacks and days gone by

Not giving up after major setbacks is a tall order. I’ve slid quite a bit since I stopped my diet — I’ve regained a noticeable amount of weight. My travel to Louisiana is over, so it’s time for me to be getting back on the diet again. But it’s so easy to keep putting it off. It’s just so discouraging to get on the scale, it’s easier to avoid weighing myself another day. I had a smaller setback with Duolingo, for studying German. I got up to a 17-day streak, including the whole trip to visit family. But then my first day back I crash right after work, and lose my streak. Now I’m debating whether to go practice today, and it’s just easy to say “well I’m not breaking a streak by not practicing today, let’s give myself the day off.” The trouble with that of course is that one day turns into three turns into a week.

I’m at loose ends with this blog. For a while I was so determined to make it a blog about goal-setting and personal development in general, and I had this whole idea about maybe even starting a podcast and such. Some things came together to make me aware that that was not the best use of my time or efforts, so I dropped the focus on goal-setting. But now I don’t know what to focus on. In a way it’s its own sort of big setback.

I had a bit of a stop-gap focus for this blog by focusing on family, the initial time around Christmas when family was visiting me, and then this more recent trip to go visit family myself. It’s a good focus, but not one that’s sustainable. Most of my life isn’t lived with family, unfortunately. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, actually. If I could work remotely and so work wherever I want, I’d spend a lot of time with family. But would I actually move to where they are? Initially I would have said yes in a heartbeat, but that throws the whole roadtrip that I went on last year out the window. I specifically chose to live where I live, and went through a lot of effort to be here. And when I think about it, I wouldn’t want to live permanently where my family lives. But if I could work remotely, I could visit as often as I wanted to. So I think that’s what I would want. To be able to work remotely and just visit family a ton.

The end of my trip to Louisiana was wonderful, if nostalgia-inducing. There were a lot of hugs, and a lot more card playing. We visited a small lake a short drive away, and wandered up and down a pier there. There were some abandoned fishing lures, and my uncle found a rotting tree to tear apart. We talked about growing old and about others in the family and about days gone by. And now that trip is itself part of days gone by. I’ve been reminiscing so much since getting back.

It’s not breathtaking, but it’s a place to breathe…