Atrophy, Momentum
Daily Meditation 596 — 10/14/2023
Your day off. Lovely.
No alarms, no important events. Just you doing what you want.
Slowly, your body wakes up to its (apparently) preferred hour of 9:32 a.m., your last-night of a few drinks with friends still lightly echoing in your head and gut, a hint of a headache and a touch of dehydration, but otherwise not bad.
Grabbing your phone from your nightstand, you immediately and voraciously start scrolling.
Your bed is warm, the cloud cover keeps your bedroom dark, and the bright screen in your hands sinks more and more hooks into your mind.
“Holy shit,” you mumble to yourself as you finally observe the time in the upper corner of the tiny device.
“It’s already nearly 11.”
How often do things like this happen to us?
We sit on the toilet with our phone in hand (or a good book, perhaps, but to be frank, I doubt it), and our quick loo break turns into a 15 minute one where only our legs going numb gets us up.
We squander our full 15 minute break at work scrolling X or FaceBook or Instagram or Pornhub (hopefully not!) or whatever Zuckerberg’s X-competitor-I’ve-already-forgotten-about…
We allow ourselves to become amomentumed (not a word), sinking our butts further and further into a couch crater, that damnable and addicting screen tethering us in place.
Slowly, this atrophies us.
It’s less time walking and moving — things our body is truly designed to do.
It’s less time reading something good for us, challenging us — things our mind is designed to do.
It’s less time with our family, friends, and community — things we are socially designed to do.
And once we lose our momentum and get further sunk into that crater, it gets harder and harder to regain it.
When I was about 23, I was in pretty fantastic shape.
I’d come home from work and generally do 30–90 minutes of “bodyweight” workouts about 5 days a week.
Pushups. Sit ups. Planks. Jumping jacks. Wall sits. Pull ups. Etc.
I’d be drenched in sweat. I was lean and very strong.
One day? I had a hernia. The recovery left me for nearly a year in awful pain during lifting, turning, or exertion.
All the momentum I had gained disappeared.
I had atrophied during the months of recovery, gotten used to laying about playing games and not working.
Getting back to work was hard enough.
But getting back to working out took me years to get to the same intensity.
The rub?
Avoid allowing yourself the time to sink into amomentum, into atrophying.
Maybe today you just drive to the gym.
Tomorrow, you walk inside.
The next day, you sit and do one lift for one set.
Then, it’s 3 minutes of lifting.
Then, 4.
And so on.
Maybe tomorrow you wake up and don’t touch your phone for the first minute.
Then it’s 2.
3 the day after.
You cannot slingshot yourself out of amomentum and atrophy.
Just focus on the building the new momentum, the new habits slowly, gradually.
Focus on the foundations beneath the habits — marking an “X” on the calendar each day, as it were.
You don’t need goals…
You need to do the thing.
Oh — and one more thing…
Put the damn phone down more!
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These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”
