As I have passed the halfway mark with my drawing challenge and this is the second time I have carried out a 30 day challenge, I am looking to take this forward to other areas of my life. One of the main ones is health, but I plan to try out others too. I used to go out walking every day, most of the time twice a day. Since moving from the family house and all that entailed I somewhere lost sight of this. One would think that living in a place of beauty is the motivation to just go outside. However in my case that has not always been the case over the last couple of years.

Due to life events leading me to this point I have struggled with the lack of for want of a better word, focus. Not having a job and career to provide that structure I threw myself into treating walking as my job. In those darker days, it helped me concentrate and as a byproduct helped me lose weight, lots of weight. But once I had completed the move of forty-four years of a families life, I felt worn out. I’m still amazed at how I and my brother managed to achieve this feat! But the consequences of that were relaxing the resolve and determination to complete the goal of returning to an ideal weight if there is such a thing.

So the purpose of this post is to get myself going again and try and use the repetitive nature of the thirty-day challenge to spur me on to go walking every day. I have chosen to do this in the morning before 9 am. This is to help start the day in a positive frame of mind. I know this works as it worked in the past for me. In fact, it has many benefits not just physical ones and there are many studies that highlight the benefits of walking for mental healthiness.

It gets the exercise out of the way before the day starts and means that I’m less likely to procrastinate through the day and not do something that is important to me and also something I enjoy. Starting the day with a tick in the box helps the feeling of progress, makes one feel more energetic and allows for some consideration of life and the days’ tasks that no other method in my view does.

I have often been extolled with the virtues of meditation and in my younger years attempted it via the guidance of a girlfriend. I gave up quickly and always rather dismissed it as not for me. However, leaving the often manic life in London for the quietness of the Dales lead me to realise that “my mediation” was walking. I would often find that I had covered a distance that I couldn’t remember. I had been pondering or meditating over, “life, the universe and everything” I now find if I have things on my mind the best solution is to go for a walk.

So that brings me back to the here and now. Starting tomorrow 22nd July, for 30 days I am going for a morning walk and take a picture. At the end of it stitch them together into a time-lapse as I think this will be a nice way to mark the completion.

So lets see if I hear my alarm in the morning! :)

One of life’s mysteries and aggravations is why for the love of … can’t Apple combine my two Apple IDs. When I got my very first iPhone they gave me another ID that had to be my email at me account not allowing a simple username. What was wrong with my original Mac account that I had since who knows when. It had email addresses attached to it so if it was a case of communication that would have been acceptable. Then there’s all the apps, music etc that got brought from one or other of these accounts and before I became aware of this when buying from my Mac and or iPhone, if only they had told me in “dim wit” language that I was not buying from a primary ID.

With all Apples tech savvy sometimes things go wrong, badly wrong. Yes in the scheme of things it is pretty trivial but I sometimes wonder if the high-ups are screaming at their devices “just use the right one!” It gives me a smile but then they probably have a person to manage all that for them. In searching the internet there seems no way of remedying this short of re-buying all my stuff, which ain’t going to happen, maybe the conspiracy theorists are lining up to point out “they” are doing it on purpose as to make more profits but I think it’s more likely to be ineptitude and arrogance. As a Joe public user I just want my stuff to work and I’m guessing the majority of iPhone users fall into this boat. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember and there seems no likelihood of it being addressed as most of Apples new customers are iPhone users and they are guiding to create an email based username rather that the older name ID.

All this has been brought about by wanting to spring clean my data, i.e emails, domain names. But this is one sticking point I’ll never be able to remove so I’ll just have to reconcile myself to living a double life.

Oh well back to culling gmail.

I guess this is my first proper post on micro.blog apart from my doodling so I decided to have a go at putting something on my phone to remind me what life is about but not in a nagging way. With a bit of footaling about on Sketchbook and some finger prodding art I present to you my screenshot of my phone. As I have my phone with me virtually always and probably now use it 80% of the time pretty much over all other devices in my world. I thought that the gentle reminder would nudge me to do the right thing. I came across the 3 words site and tried it out a couple of years ago but could never really concentrate on it enough to follow it through. I liked the fact that it was an alternative to those pesky New Years resolutions that had faded from memory within a month of making them and that it was something to look at and review through the year even if in the end it produced no progress. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Step up “enough” and a theme I like the sound of not just for the ethos but also it being one thing, that needs my attention, which that I can concentrate on. I love the duality of the meaning; “I have enough”, “I don’t have enough” and “Is it enough?” I love that in any given moment I can ask “Enough?”. There’s a lot of talk around the internet of having periods of time for things, change, pretty much anything one wants to focus on. The year of… However I think that this one word covers it all, whether it be do I really need a new thing or shouldn’t I be looking at a particular negative or hindering behaviour or that I should push myself to do better things, go places. I know that one word on its own is one word but it’s a pretty good word to live by.

I have just passed the one month mark of being here on M.b, yes I know I’m a Jonny come lately.. and I set out to use this as partly an experiment in consistency and focus and partly to carry on something I started to pass the time on the bus commute home on my iPhone. This was long before the days of the iPad and even more so for the ✏️ so rather rudimentary finger art. Having decided at one minute past twelve on the first of January that I was going to make some changes to life and I thought about how I would actually achieve this. After many hours of internet research which uncovered some very interesting resources, to effect adult behavioural change it needs to be done by small actions built up over time.

What has all this got to do with my drawings? Well in order to help with the desired changes I decided that a good way was to set a task to see if I could consistently focus myself for a month. That now being completed I am thinking of trying another experiment for a month and will build on this over the next year.

So what of the doodles well I find it quite hard some days to find the content as life is pretty routine and not every day has stand out moments. I also find it takes some significant time to finish them and wonder if that time would be better spent elsewhere. So I am thinking of changing to a weekly routine unless I can find ways to speed up the process but then that takes away the originality. Maybe I should start getting up at four thirty in the morning to be “crushing it”. Anyway I’ve enjoyed this experiment and am interested to see if I can continue my year of change.