life changes 7: meditiation

I’ve only been meditating regularly for a few weeks so, like most of my previous life changes posts, this one should definitely not be read by anyone expecting expert advice. This is about trying meditation. I thought it might be interesting to chronicle why I started, what has happened during that month as well as what I’ve learned, and some expectations I have for the future.

Meditation is one of those things I had wanted to try for a long time but never got around to. I had heard that meditating regularly could provide benefits such as improved health, emotional balance, relaxation, general life satisfaction etc. There have been times of high pressure and anxiety in the past where I wished I had something like this to turn to. Something to make life a bit easier to cope with and to provide greater equanimity with which to face difficult times; but for some reason I never bothered to follow up the wish with any actual action. In line with my recently-found open-mindedness and general drive to improve the way I’m living, I decided to try and find out something about it and go from there.

As usual, with things I know nothing about, I started by doing some research on the net. I looked at a lot of websites and read a bunch of stuff. Some of it was pretty new-agey, some of it mentioned God. Pretty-much anything like that has lost me from the start – that’s simply not a direction I’m heading in – but among the garbage were some good resources. Here’s two I found useful:

• Firstly, a simple two-page guide to meditating from a website called stopandbreathe.com. This guide is not aligned with any religion or philosophy. It simply sets out a particular approach on how to meditate. It’s easy to read, assumes you know nothing about starting to meditate, and sets out some directions anyone could follow.
• The second is a pdf from a site called zenguide.com, which seems to serve as something of a directory to zen groups worldwide, as well as a compendium of information about zen buddhism, books on zen etc. At 66 pages, this guide is significantly longer than the one above. It goes into great detail about some of the history, philosophy and practice of zen meditation (known as Zazen), but it’s readable, is written for beginners, and is quite interesting.

Zen sounded interesting though again, I knew pretty much nothing about it. In trying to discover more, I stumbled on this excellent introduction from the website of a Brisbane-based group called: Open Way Zen. Within this introduction I read the following:

it is important to understand what enlightenment means. Enlightenment is seeing clearly what is here, now – nothing more than that – without all the glosses or filters that our habitual mental processes usually bring.

To me this resonated strongly, as it sounds very much like moments of clarity I’ve experiencing while running. My interest was piqued and I wanted to explore the world of zen a bit further. As I mentioned earlier, a major roadblock presents itself to me with anything spiritual when God enters into it. This doesn’t happen in zen. In this respect, zen is not a religion in the way that, say Judaism, Christianity or Islam are religions. It might be more accurate to think of zen as a philosophy and guide to living.

The next logical step for my journey into zen was a book called “The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice and Enlightenment” by Philip Kapleau. First published in 1965 and never out of print since, this book is considered a seminal work in bringing legitimate information about zen to western audiences in easy-to-digest form. It is pretty much recommended everywhere as the place to go for anyone wanting a first look at zen, so I picked up a copy and am reading as I write this. So far it’s really good. It presents instruction on zazen in a very detailed and, what appears to be, highly authentic way.

You certainly don’t need to get into zen to start practicing and experiencing the benefits of meditation. The catalyst for me was actually an app for my iPhone called The Mindfulness App. Mindfulness, I have found, is what results when you make awareness and attention a priority above all else for a short period of time. This is basically what happens in meditation, or at least what has been happening for me. It’s about saying: “For the next 15 minutes I’m going to focus on one simple thing and remain totally attentive to that one thing to the exclusion of all else for that period.” The focus of attention is usually one’s breathing, at least for beginners.

This app is quite nice. If you search the app store you’ll find a number of apps that all do similar things, but this one hasn’t disappointed me. The main part of it I’ve used is the guided meditations, which are just recordings of spoken instructions that help get you into a state of mindfulness, and keep you there for a given period of time. There are three, five, fifteen and thirty-minute versions. The idea is to start with short meditations and work your way up as you feel you want to. Obviously the quality of these guided meditations is dependent on the person that recorded them. In this case the guide is Catherine Polan Orzech; a teacher of stress-reduction at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. In my view she’s done a good job. The recordings are very professionally made and work well.

So now I had some idea of how to meditate and a tool to help me do it. Where did I go next? How did I actually start doing it? Obviously the time and location you choose for your meditation is key. You need a time and place that is relatively peaceful, and one where you will not be disturbed half-way through. For me, living in a house with three busy females ranging from 11 to adult, this was not as easy as it might sound. I have meditated at home, but it’s proven difficult to arrange a regular time that works. In Kapleau’s book, the recommended times for meditation are first thing in the morning before breakfast, and/or last thing at night just before bed. So far these have been difficult for me.

The time that did work was lunchtime at work. I’m lucky enough to work a short walk from Brisbane River. That’s where I’d been having my lunch each day. Now I just started adding a 3-minute meditation to the start of my lunch ritual. Put the earphones on, closed my eyes and followed the guide. It’s a reasonably busy path alongside the river, and I must have looked a bit weird sitting there with my eyes closed, but I didn’t care and no-one ever intentionally disturbed me, and at least for the first couple of weeks I found the river a reasonably pleasant location. What eventually turned me off it was that after two weeks of meditating every day I had worked my way up to 15 minutes and for that duration, the noises of other pedestrians just became too distracting. By this time I’d really come to value the lunchtime sessions and didn’t want to end them, so I looked for a better location, and found one. I’m not going to divulge too much here because I want this sacred spot to remain as unknown and private as it currently is, but there does exist in Milton a magical place of tranquility and relative privacy that, for the past few weeks I’ve been very happily retreating to at lunchtimes to grab my 15 minutes of mindfulness.

The effect of meditation is not miraculous. I can not levitate and I am not about to walk on hot coals or had my third eye suddenly activated. But there’s no doubt it brings more calm to one’s life, and I suspect over time other benefits may become clear. Right now I have to say the great appeal of meditation lies not in it’s effects, but in the practice itself. Those 15 minute intervals have come to represent little oases of pure peace, and that’s addictive. The other tangible effect is the ability to use the breath as an anchor. I’m quoting here directly from Catherine Polan Orzech in the guided meditations. She suggests that the state of objectivity and peace achieved during meditation can be quickly re-entered in general day-to-day life by simply breathing intentionally, as you do in meditation. This acts as a sort of trigger which can be prevailed on when needed. I have used this a number of times recently, with growing frequency actually, because it works. The next step for me is probably to move into unguided meditation. In this, Kapleau’s book offers plenty of good advice that I’m probably close to putting into practice.

That’s about it – so far. I’ll report any further progress when it happens.

tips for new cyclists: survive the road

After riding to work just about every day, rain or shine, for the past three months, I’ve picked up a few tips you may find helpful if you’re planning to start commuting by bike and don’t have a lot of experience on the road. Don’t let this post scare you off commuting by bike. Ditching the car and taking up cycling has been one of the best lifestyle decisions I ever made, but don’t kid yourself, roads are potentially dangerous places for cyclists and every second you spend on them you need to be making safety a priority. If you are reading this as an experienced road-rider, please feel free to reply and add anything I may have missed, or respond to anything you think I’ve got wrong.

Before I start – a short note about footpaths; Unless there are no alternatives, you should pretty much forget about riding on them. It’s generally a bad idea. Check your local traffic rules on this. In many localities you are not even allowed to ride on footpaths. In Brisbane you are, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. Most footpaths are too narrow to allow you to comfortably share them with pedestrians who, if they are moving, are doing so at a speed profoundly incompatible with yours. The very first time I took my road bike out I was apprehensive of riding on roads and stuck instead to footpaths. It only took that one ride – trying to squeeze past pedestrians ambling down narrow paths, almost colliding with them when they randomly stepped out in front of me – to cure me of wanting to ride on footpaths.

I’ve arranged these tips into two sections. Firstly, things you can do before you set out:

• At the risk of stating the obvious, the best safety tip I can offer up front is to avoid heavy traffic. Whenever you can, look for less busy side roads. This may take you slightly out of your way, but it will definitely make for a safer ride. Also, where possible, use roads that have a designated bike lane painted onto them. Regular drivers will be used to sharing these roads with bikes and make the appropriate allowances. There are resources on the web to help you find streets that are more bike-friendly than others. You might like to read this post which contains some tips about planning your route.
• Wear a helmet. You may be old enough to remember a world before bike helmets – that was a world where you were far more likely to fracture your skull when you came off your bike. You never know when you’re going to have a fall, and when you do you’re going to want your head protected, so wear a helmet when you ride.
• Also, in order to have some idea of what may be coming up behind you, don’t wear earphones. In traffic your ears are almost as important as your eyes. Riding in traffic is not a time you need entertainment. It’s a time for you to be focusing on what’s going on around you, and using all your senses to do so.
• Be seen – try and wear something bright and, if possible, reflective, especially if you’re riding at night. If you don’t own any reflective clothing, white is the next best thing. Black may be cool, but light, bright colours will get you seen. Also, have reflectors and lights – front and back, with charged batteries in them. Running out of headlight on a dark road at night when you’re still kilometers from home isn’t fun. I know – it’s happened to me. Also, lights are not just for night-time. If you’re riding in the early morning or late afternoon/dusk, your lights should definitely be on.

Secondly, some tips about what to do while you’re riding:

• Ride with the traffic, never against it.
• Many bikes naturally orient their riders to be facing down, looking at the road just in front of the handlebars. Generally, sharing a road with heavy traffic is not a great time to have your head down. You need to be aware of everything that is going on in the 180 degrees in front of you, and in the medium to long distance, not just the foreground. So when you are riding in traffic, keep your head up.
• Beware of cars in driveways, or side streets, waiting to come out in front of you. They may:
  a) underestimate your speed
  b) not see you (especially if the sun is low in the sky and behind you from the driver’s point of view).
  c) Be crazy and just think that because you are on a bike you don’t matter.

… and any of these scenarios could cause them to suddenly, randomly pull out in front of you causing you to either stop, or hit them. Be ready. Also …

• Make eye contact with drivers that could potentially pull out in front of you – This enables you to be sure the driver knows you are there.
• Anticipate places where you may need to stop suddenly (like approaching junctions), prepare by unclipping your cleats. When crossing a junction, never assume there will be no traffic on it, even if it is a junction that is usually pretty quiet. Make sure you have had a good look in every direction traffic could potentially come from before you commit to crossing.
• If you are coming up behind any cars waiting to make a left turn, assume they don’t know you’re there. If they are ahead of you, wait for them to complete their turn before you come forward into the junction. (note to non-Australians – we drive and ride on the left side of the road. If you don’t, then read “left” as “right”).
• Don’t ride close to parked cars. Some drivers don’t look before opening their doors. Of all the perils on this list, this one has come closest to being my undoing. Leave enough space between yourself and parked cars so that if someone opens a door it won’t collect you. If this means you need to ride in the car lane, then this is what you need to do. According to the road rules (at least in my locality) a bike is every bit as much of a legitimate vehicle as a car and you have a right to travel in car lanes when you need to.
• Use hand signals before turning. Drivers need to know what you are going to do. This may seem difficult at first, but don’t let that stop you from persevering – this is a skill you need to master.

Well, that’s about everything I can think of. Again, let me say that I don’t want to scare you off commuting by bike – and looking back at the imposing list above I can see how you might find it off-putting. But look: the reality is that no driver wants to run into you. That would really spoil their day. The majority of drivers are out there doing what they need to do to avoid running into you. But accidents do happen, without anyone intending them to – that’s why they’re called accidents – and when you are riding in traffic you need to minimise your chances of one of them happening to you.

life changes 6: consuming less

In one of my recent posts I wrote about how the positive effects of some changes are not restricted to those changes alone; that there can be a flow-on effect.  As a combined consequence of no-longer smoking, restricting the junk food I was buying every day at work, and using a bike to commute rather than car and train, I now spend significantly less money each week on life habits.

On an average week I used to spend:

• smokes: $25 per day @ $17 for a pack of 30 = $14.25 per day, or $100 pw.
• maccas for lunch @ around $8 per day, replaced by 1 apple, 1 small tin of tuna and a couple of Vita Wheat biscuits = around $3 = saving of $5 per day, or $25pw.
• train = around $7.20 per day = around $36 pw.
• petrol = approx $30 pw.

= total savings of $191 per week.

I have noticed the jangle of extra money in my pocket. It’s been nice. I’ve been using the extra money to buy things that facilitate some of my new life-choices, like my new bike and accessories, clothing etc. We have been spending some money on home renovations. We bought a family tent to have more holidays away, and we’ve been doing things like going out to dinner and buying books and cd’s more often etc. But all this just keeps us on the financial path we have always been on, namely that of living exactly at our means: not one dollar below, and fails to address the obvious opportunity for life improvement: that of reducing our debt.

I owe truckloads of money to banks. The bank still owns about half of my house, a sizable percentage of my car, and my credit card is never more that a couple of hundred bucks under it’s limit. Do I even dream of being debt-free? Nope. Just like the majority of other folk in the western world, I’ve spent my entire adult life paying off debt and am completely conditioned to the prospect of paying off debt for most of the rest of my life as well. I earn around $75,000 a year and I’ve been working for around 25 years. At current dollar-value rates, I have earned approximately 1.875 million dollars during my lifetime. Add my wife’s income to the pile and we’re at around 3.75 million. What do we have to show for it?  We own around $250,000 of our house. Add our car and all our other junk on to that and we’re up to maybe $350,000, at the most. Around 10% of our income has been converted into actual wealth. 90% of it has been simply consumed. How did this happen? How is it that I am so stupid as to have allowed myself to throw so much money away during my life?

Thesis: since the day we are born, we are bombarded with a form of mind-control called “marketing” to get us addicted to consuming things like sugar, snack foods, cigarettes, petrol, energy, entertainment, fashion, gadgets/appliances etc. The market determines the price of these things, not based on any intrinsic value they have, but rather, on what we can be convinced to pay for them. To help us pay more, the innovation of credit has come to assume more and more epic proportions. The brain-washing has been so persuasive that we have, to a large extent, come to measure our own personal value against how much we are able to buy. Consumerism has become like a religion. We strive and compete to be the biggest consumers we can possibly be, and utilise credit to the maximum extent we can, in order to lead, what we have been convinced are fulfilled lives.

My thesis is a bit simplistic I know. It only talks about the stuff we buy that we don’t need. It doesn’t take into account the stuff we need to have – things like shelter, transport, basic sustaining food, medicine and healthcare etc, but no-one can argue that these things exist completely outside the consumer marketplace – that we aren’t frequently convinced to spend more on them than we actually need to. That we don’t compete to spend as much on these items as we possibly can. We do. So I’m going to let it stand. It expresses what I want to express which is that there is something wrong with the picture. That this way of living does not necessarily provide the individual, or the community in general with optimal opportunities for leading a meaningful existence or for building wealth.

A few months ago I was walking down Park Road in MIlton, watching the well-dressed folk around me spending their money as quickly as they could, and thinking about this modern religion of consumerism, and the following wise little slogan popped into my head:

If you need to measure yourself, measure yourself according to what you do, rather than what you own.

Many of us are addicted to shopping. We throw around terms like “consumer-therapy” ironically, but most of us indulge in it. We think spending money is going to make us feel better. We are so used to it – so conditioned into it, that we don’t even notice when it’s happening. But does it really work? Does it help us lead good lives, or are we really just running along on the treadmill, playing a role we have been trained to play, by a society that never stops to ask itself why?

The question for me, now that I’ve started to reduce my regular consumption, is whether I could go further and actually achieve something positive by converting the excess capital into reducing my debt. The measure of success would be the elimination of debt, starting with my credit card, then my car loan. Of course, each eliminated debt would result in the freeing-up of additional capital which could, in turn, be directed to further debt elimination, with the ultimate goal of becoming completely debt-free. When do I start? I think, as with any life-change, the answer has to be: “today”. So starting now I’m identifying savings that can be made, and on my next pay day there will be some additional money to be directed towards my debt.

Obviously this is a very long-term goal, but I’m declaring it – here and now. It’s one of those life changes that takes a long time to produce results, but I guess the first step toward achieving a goal must be to identify and declare it. If, by changing my consumer habits (by de-consuming), I am able to at least shorten my long-term debt commitments, then it will have been a worthwhile exercise. I’ll let you know what happens.

tips for new cyclists: stop falling over!

Where Fig Tree Pocket Road starts to curve around onto the Centenary Motorway bikepath, there is an almost-blind-spot where, up until my first Monday morning on the new Ridley, I had never had the misfortune to come face-to-face with anyone. However, on that fateful Monday morning with my feet feeling very unsure on new pedals that my cleats were stuck way too-firmly inside, I found myself head-on with a guy coming fast the other way. He swerved. I braked, came to a dead stop, tried unsuccessfully to extricate my feet from the pedals, wobbled and fell over on my right-hand-side … into the bushes. As they say, nothing much was hurt except for my pride and the other guy couldn’t have been nicer, but it highlighted a problem I’d been having for the previous three months on Sam’s bike, though not to the same extent, namely: badly adjusted pedal binding springs.

I confess with great embarrassment that I had actually fallen over twice prior to this. both times as the result of having to make sudden stops and being unable to remove my cleats from the pedals. What I didn’t know – and this is something that should definitely be on the list of the first 10 things every new commuting cyclist needs to know – is that the springs are adjustable. I went down that Monday to the local bike shop near my work: MB Cycles in MIlton, and asked the guy there what I needed to do to make the pedals release my cleats more readily. I assumed I would need some kind of lubricant or something along those lines. He was good enough not to actually laugh at me, but instead showed me the screws on the pedals that I needed to adjust.

The reason I’m posting this is because I was quite astonished at the difference adjusting those screws made. There are (on Shimano pedals) 2 screws on each pedal. The process involves first tightening all four of them all the way ’till they stop (by turning them clockwise), then unscrewing each of them the same number of turns so that every one is equally tight/loose. I unscrewed each screw 5 revolutions. There is a little red indicator that shows how tight the springs are. At this adjustment each indicator showed about half tension. I thought I would leave the adjustments at that stage and see if any improvements were apparent the next morning when I rode to work. Well, for me, with my pedals and my shoes, this turned out to be the perfect setting. For the first time in three months I wasn’t battling to get either of my cleats into, or out of the pedals. Hallelujah! Riding just became so much easier and more pleasant, and all for just 5 minutes of mucking around with an Allen key.

So if you are new to riding and having problems getting your shoes into, or out of your pedals, don’t do what I did and put up with it – do something about it. Here’s the instruction sheet that tells you how to adjust your pedal springs if you have Shimano mountain bike pedals like mine. If you don’t, get onto Google and do a search. The instructions for adjusting your pedals will be there somewhere. Make the adjustment. Your life will be better.

new home – goethe’s dream

Considering what I’ve written over the past month, how much I’ve enjoyed writing this particular thread, and that I feel I have only just dipped my toe into the ocean of possibilities in terms of writing about this stuff, I have decided to move the thread from its origins on Tumblr, into a Wordpress blog of its own (this one).

I am launching this blog with some sense of ambition – Not ambition that it will attract thousands of readers, but ambition that it may, over time, come to weave a more and more complete and articulate tapestry out of this thread (positive life change) and thereby have some value. In this sense it is interesting to see the kind of ambitious idea that just one month’s effort can grow into, out of nothing: an idea that didn’t exist for me a month ago

When I started writing the first of these posts on my Tumblr account a month ago I had no plan and no notion other than an instinctive desire to share some positive life changes.

About the title – have you got any idea how many blogs there already are on WordPress? I wanted a title I could pretty well replicate in the url – but the first hundred thousand or so urls I tried were already taken. I had to get pretty creative. The title is derived from the famous quote from German philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which I used in my very first post, and which goes thus:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

That pretty much sums up this blog I guess. Stop procrastinating, decide on the kind of life you want, and start living it!

life changes 5: becoming positive

Something else has changed, but this feels harder to write about. Why? Maybe because physical change is easy to see, easy to measure, easy to set goals for, while attitudinal change is more personal, more subjective. It’s a slippery subject and I’m not really used to talking about it – Plus I’m really aware and conscious of setting myself up to sound like I’m giving advice. I’m not. I’m just sharing what happened to me. I’ve been aware of my attitudinal change and lived with it for a while now. It has been profound to me. Like the physical changes, it is the start of something. There are further developments waiting ahead on the path, and no account of the changes I’ve been through over the past year would be complete without a discussion of how my mind-set has changed.

I also want to add that it is important to me, in discussing these changes, that I frame them properly in terms of my authenticity as a person. Put simply, nothing is ever going to make me want to stop being who I am. I am not in the business of becoming a less-authentic person, but I believe that making positive attitudinal changes does not change who you are – it just changes how you approach life.

There is plenty here to come back to at some later point, but for now I want to forge ahead and talk about what happened to me, and about the flow-on effect, or how the positive outcomes of one change are not necessarily limited to that one change.

The Flow-On Effect

Quitting smoking generated for me, a fantastic sense that I was more capable than I had previously realised. I basked in this feeling. I was, after all,  experiencing the normal cravings and discomfort associated with breaking a 30-year addiction. To balance this I needed as much positive reinforcement as I could get. You can harness this improvement in self-esteem to enable yourself to take on more new achievements, and with each new achievement, the self-esteem continues to grow, in turn enabling more, opening yourself up to trying new things. This is what happened to me and what led to me improving my fitness, improving my diet and taking up cycling.

The adage goes; “healthy body – healthy mind”, and as I became physically healthier, it became apparent that positive change was infiltrating my psyche. I was bounding about, facing the tasks in my life with new energy. Smiling more. Looking forward to things more. As the positive outcomes of trying new things became more apparent I became more open to trying new things. Amidst this new energy I considered trying to consciously adopt positivism, as a sort of new habit, a conscious change, in a similar way to how I had adopted new physical habits.

But how do you do it? How do you actually change your day-to-day attitudes to become more positive? Well, I expect there are a multitude of ways – probably an infinite variety of them, and I’m just getting started, but I decided to start by attempting to banish (as far as possible) the negative attitudes that I have known my whole life are a waste of my time; Those attitudes that produce nothing positive in my life and have no place within the better person I want to, and can actually be. Here’s two I’ve been thinking about:

• “I can’t do it” – Low self-esteem: not even trying something when I actually know I could succeed at it if I just stop using fear of failure as an excuse for my laziness (phew).
• “I hate you” – Bitterness and prejudice about other people. This is so instinctive. Even when I’ve decided to stop I keep doing it. Noticing it. Every day. I’m not the kind of guy that can just start loving every one of my fellow humans – not today anyway. But I don’t need to do that today. What I do need to start to do is stop acting like a baby and having negative, nasty thoughts about other people that are just like me, for no reason –  So when I have these thoughts I notice them and make a point of telling myself it’s stupid.

I have found a couple of secret weapons that make it easier to battle negative attitudes.

Secret Weapon 1: There is power in the things you say. When you say things to other people, you get used to being the kind of person that says those things and this helps you become that kind of person. I’ve been making a point of verbalising the kind of maturity and positivism I want to feel in myself. People have noticed this, especially some of the people closest to me. You see the ripple effect start to happen; the positive attitude jumps over to them, like electricity arcing between two conductors. And maybe they are able to carry this positivity, or some part of it, on into their encounters with other people during the day.

Secret Weapon 2: Meditation. I started this year. I will do another post just on meditation soon, but for the purpose of this discussion; In meditation you can learn to create an anchor for yourself, using breathing. When, during your day, you catch your thoughts heading in a direction you don’t want them to, you can throw out that anchor and create some space to become clear and re-align with reality. I’m sure this becomes much more effective over time and I’ve only just started, but already it works. I use this technique, at some point every day, and it makes a difference.

My last point about positivism: It feels good. It might seem dumb, but this is something of a revelation to me. I never expected it to feel good, but it does. I guess for most of my life I’ve habitually held a generally negative outlook, and the thing that doesn’t occur to you is that negativity actually feels bad. You may not realise it while you’re in the midst of it, but in retrospect …

A positive attitude is one of those self-reciprocating behaviours. The more you do it, the more you want to do it.

I’ve actually had this post in draft for a couple of weeks. I’ve been working away at it, trying to remove as much of the bullshit factor from it as possible. For some reason I’m quite self-conscious about that. This probably explains why it’s a bit more stripped-down than some of the other posts I’ve put up lately. Like I said at the start, I’m not used to talking about this kind of stuff, but now that I’ve made a start I’d like to think and write about it more. Anyway, in the spirit of being open to doing new kinds of things I’ve changed the “Save as Draft” button, over to “Publish Now”. Apprehension be damned!

2012 Enerflex Brissie to the Bay bike ride

I am riding in the 2012 Enerflex Brissie to the Bay bike ride to join the fight against MS. I am raising funds to show my support and your donation will make an impact to change the lives of people living with MS.

MS affects more than 21,000 Australians and there is no cure.

Did you know:

• 5 Australians are diagnosed with MS every working day
• The average age of diagnosis is just 30 years of age

Your support will provide vital services and support to assist all those affected by MS to live life to their fullest and reach their true potential.

Please DONATE to support my ride and make your impact on the lives of Australians living with MS.

life changes 4: replacing car with bike

My brother-in-law; Sam has been a keen bike-rider for a few years and every now and then he encouraged me to give it a go. In February this year – in line with the extra exercise I was doing, and having a weight loss target etc, it finally made sense to me. Indeed, the way the pieces all fit into place was like one of those revelatory moments. I’d seen Sam from time to time, kitted out in his lycra and wearing those weird knicks pants and I’d always thought; “nah – that’s another world – one I just don’t get.” but I guess by February 2012 I had started to open up to another world, a wider world – It was time to start accepting in a lot of things that had previously seemed alien to me – and bike riding was one of those “alien” concepts.

Sam had a few bikes and had previously offered me the use of one of them; a hybrid bike designed for commuting, which was pretty much what I had in mind. I rang him up and asked if he minded me accepting his kind offer. The next thing he was round at my place, unloading the bike off his car rack and presenting me with a complimentary first pair of knicks. This was the weekend. I intended for Monday to be my first day to try the ride to work, and having not ridden a bike seriously since I was about 12, thought I better get in some practice. So I hopped on, rode down the pavement (scared of riding on the road with cars), narrowly missing pedestrians and, through a convoluted and very hilly route, ended up on the bike path that runs alongside our local freeway. I rode along it for maybe 2 kilometres, got passed by every other rider on it. sweated, got thigh-burn going up a hill, turned round and then got drenched in what must have been the most torrential sub-tropical downpour of the whole summer, and finally showed up back at home feeling pleased with myself – I’d gone for a bike ride.

That afternoon I figured the important thing would be to work out exactly what streets I was going to ride down on Monday morning – to be prepared. So I sat down at my computer, pulled up Google Maps and spent about an hour intently studying the roads and paths that could get me where I needed to go, eventually deciding on an optimal route.

Monday morning came. I had an idea that I would need to shower after my ride (fortunately we have a good shower at my work building), so I packed a bag full of clothes, soap etc, strapped it to the back of the bike and set off into my unknown new life. My expectation was that this was an experiment only. If I hated it, or felt that for whatever reason it just didn’t work – then I would quite happily give it up and go back to cars, trains and the commuting life I had known up to that point. But I wanted it to work. I’d given it quite a bit of thought and, as I mentioned earlier, it just seemed to make so much sense that it would be a shame not to go with it. For one thing, there was the fitness argument. I figured I’d have to be burning maybe 700 calories every day I rode rather than drove. And fitting the exercise into my commute time was such a fantastic efficiency; I was reclaiming at least an hour of evening exercise time every day I rode to work. Then there was the commute-time argument. My home city; Brisbane – like many modern cities – has become so strangled by cars every Monday to Friday, that even though I work only 12 kilometers from my office, it takes at least 40 minutes to get there. I can actually do the trip just as quick – if not quicker – on a bike. It just doesn’t make sense using a car to travel at an average speed of less than 20 kilometers-per-hour, and on the way adding to the pollution and congestion of the city. When you think about it – it’s pretty crazy. Then there’s the money savings. I figured petrol and rain tickets run me up to around $50 per week.

So with all this in mind I set off for work, followed the path I had worked out, got sore, sweaty and exhausted, but made it in one piece, chained my bike to the rack in our office car park, showered, changed and went to work – a better man for the experience.

My great good fortune with cycling was that I had not one, but two excellent mentors. Roland, my colleague at work had been riding in for years, and lives close to my home. So I paid him a visit that first Monday – to boast about my bike commute, and also to ask his advice. He was able to give me some valuable pointers and I made some sensible adjustments to my route, rode home that day, and apart from school Tuesdays, (when I need to drive in to be able to pick up Ally from her after-school basketball practice), I have ridden to and from work every day since then – rain or shine.

It has now been 8 weeks. I’ve read some excellent blogs on commuting by cycle. I have found good places to shop for some of the needful things cyclists have to have (more knicks – gloves etc). I have gotten very used to my route and no-longer experience fear of sharing roads with cars, or pain and exhaustion traveling it. In fact, very shortly after I started riding, the exhaustion started getting replaced by exhilaration. You hear riders talking about this feeling of exhilaration, but until you do it yourself – and become accustomed to it – it’s hard to understand. But the moments – the moments. Early morning, when you’re hurtling alongside the river, blood pumping, fresh air suffusing lungs, body working, and sunlight glittering off a thousand points of water to your right, mind clear.

Sam has been encouraging me to join him on a weekend recreational ride ever since he loaned me the bike. I’ve resisted, on the basis that I don’t want to be ballast, dragging down a fast, experienced rider. But this week at work another colleague – who knows I’ve been getting into riding – invited me to participate in a 50 kilometer, charity fund-raising ride to take place in 2 months time, and given that my work commute is only 14 kilometers (and I accepted her challenge), I decided it’s time to get in practice for longer distances. So this morning Sam and I met up at 6 AM and went off on a 34 kilometer ride to the city and back. We were done by 7:30 – my kids were still asleep. It was great. Now I want to do it every weekend.

I’m sure I’ll do more posts about riding in the future, but I guess the point of this at the moment is simply to chronicle what I have felt are the main new opportunities that have opened up in my life which, taken collectively, have really constituted a massive change in direction for me, and more than ever before, have served to demonstrate that positive, lasting change really is possible. You can change your life for the better, even if you’ve tried before and failed, you can do it. You can do it for free. You can start today. Once you start – and open yourself up to possibilities – it’s amazing what can follow.

So far in this little series about my recent life changes I’ve covered quitting smoking, taking up running, changing to a healthier diet and cycling to work. All changes around physical health. But there are some life changes I’ve experienced that I still need to cover; changes that have maybe been more subtle than the stuff I’ve talked about so far, but which are also about opening up to new ways – and about consciously embracing positivism as part of a mindset to try and bring to everything you do.

during our easter holiday at Hervey Bay:

Leaving Fraser Island for the mainland (Hervey Bay) on the evening ferry – the sky put on an incredible show for us.

life changes 3: diet

Part of my journey has been about the food I put into my body. This has changed and is still changing. I think I want to try and go further in the direction I’ve started – but time will tell. I think you need to be careful about weight loss and “going on diets” – there is no doubt that the weight-loss industry depends to a large degree on the media presenting people with unrealistic ideas of what kind of body they should have. But balanced with that is the fact that many of us lead more sedentary lifestyles than ever before, and that obesity in countries like Australia and the US is at epidemic proportions. For people with the kind of job I have (office work) its not a bad idea to take stock of the difference between how much body fat you have, and how much body fat it would be healthyfor you to have. There are definite health and lifestyle advantages to being closer to your ideal body weight, and changing your diet to one that includes less sugar, less saturated fat, less processed food, and more fresh, natural food, has numerous positive health impacts, apart from weight loss. This isn’t going to be a detailed account of what you should do (there’s heaps of free guidance to that on the net) – rather I just want to outline some of the main changes I made – and why.

Around the time I quit smoking, along with looking at taking up more exercise, I had a desire to massively improve my eating habits. I work right next door to a Macdonalds, and it’s pretty much the only place nearby that sells food (with the exception of a BP garage). So I had developed the habit of getting my lunch from Maccas, more days than I didn’t. I tried doing the “Healthy Choices” thing for a couple of months – wrap instead of burger … salad instead of fries … but it didn’t last. When I quit smoking I was pretty regularly getting a McFat burger and fries for lunch, plus a weekend treat pretty regularly involved getting breakfast from there, and increasingly we had been taking the easy option when we were too tired to cook at night, and getting dinner there too (maybe once a fortnight). That’s the first thing I changed. I figured I don’t have to wait to get expert advice – I know Maccas aint gonna be doing my body any good. And if I can quit smokes, I can quit Maccas. So I did. One of those harsh disciplinary decisions similar to quitting smoking – NO MORE MACCAS. Period!

Ray Kurtzweil is an American writer that has dipped his hand into a lot of areas. I’ve read a couple of his books. One of his interests is health and he has a website that contains advice about what you need to do to become extremely healthy, http://www.rayandterry.com/blog/step-1-talk-to-your-doctor/ I read this stuff, and then tried to apply as much of it that:

A) I could reasonably apply given my lifestyle, and

B) I wanted to.

At first this meant trying to completely cut processed sugars out of my diet. Also things like deep-fried salty snack foods, and all the really bad processed foods – all that stuff that lines the shelves of every service station and 7-11 store. It’s all just garbage designed to get you addicted, take money out of your pocket that you’d be much better off spending on something else, and eventually give you diabetes and heart disease. The industry that manufactures this stuff is a close cousin of the tobacco industry – sorry to preach but sometimes it takes a new perspective to jolt you out of your ingrained habits. I have a huge problem with these industries that depend on getting people addicted to products that are going to kill them. I also want to point out that we are, in 2012, at a pretty extreme point in the marketing and availability of this stuff. I was a child in the 1970s and we didn’t have 7-11s in those days (in Australia) and when you went into a service station there was a rack of chocolate bars at the front counter and 1 rack of chips nearby. The shelves and shelves full of this stuff that you see in every service station nowadays simply didn’t exist – anywhere – that concept of ubiquitous, massive junkfood marketing outlets simply hadn’t been invented. There is a connection between this fact and the epidemic of obesity that has taken hold of the modern western world. We are being killed people – for the sake of the almighty dollar, you are being killed – And you are paying for the privilege – OK, back down off my pedestal.

To date I have not completely removed these kinds of foods from my life – but I pretty much don’t eat lollies (candy – sweets) or icecreams any more, and my intake of salty snackfoods has radically reduced. I also started drinking 2 litres of water per day. I have one of those stainless steel water bottles on my desk. 1 litre capacity, and I fill it and drink it twice a day. Not hard, and according to the experts – like Kurtzweil – it is a very healthy thing to do.

After Christmas I made the usual assortment of new year resolutions, with the difference that this year, following some successful life changes over the past year, I felt that some of these resolutions actually had a chance of happening. I knew I had put on some weight over the silly season and I decided to lose it. I decided to get down to my ideal body weight. There is such a thing as your ideal body weight – there are web sites that can help you determine what yours is. Mine is approximately 75 kilos. I pulled out our unused set of bathroom scales – put them in the bedroom, and weighed in – 93.5. There are probably hundreds or thousands of theories about the best way to lose weight. I researched the subject and read a bunch of them. After a bit of reading I came to the conclusion that the best focus for me was basically to ensure that I burned more calories each day through activity and exercise, than I consumed. Fortunately, these days it is easier than ever to track how many calories different foods contain, and how many calories are burned by different forms of exercise. I found a really good website that is absolutely free to register on, and that enables you to work out how much exercise you need to be doing to burn off the calories you are ingesting – and keep a daily log of it. I used this website. I started in late January and now, early April, I have lost 13 kilos. I’m down to 80. Five to go. The website helped a lot. I used it pretty fanatically – entering every meal I consumed and every bit of exercise I did. By becoming aware of my exact calorie intake and exercise balance I was able to fine-tune my intake and exercise to ensure that I made steady progress on a week-by-week basis. The site, by the way, is: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/ They also have a smartphone App, which I downloaded – I think it cost maybe a dollar or two – it synchs with the account you created on the website, and enables you to track your daily progress wherever you are. Anyway, there are plenty of ways to lose weight – this way has worked well for me. A couple of weeks ago I had the fantastic experience of trying on a pair of old jeans that haven’t fit for the past 8 years – and being able to get into them again!

While I’m talking about websites, I’m going to mention Leo Babauta’s blog; Zen Habits. I found it while initially researching diet change – and found an almost limitless supply of great information covering that topic, as well as exercise, motivation and life-change. Leo has been on a journey that has some similar elements to mine, for a few years now, and he blogs on a very regular basis. His blog is immensely popular. You can subscribe to it, which means you receive each new blog as an email. http://zenhabits.net/.

My next installment has to be about cycling to work – that’s the next place the journey led me to. An awesome personal discovery, but it’s going to have to wait a few days as Easter has arrived and we are heading up to Hervey Bay for a few days of camping, swimming and hopefully some good, relaxing fun. Happy Easter to you!