Thursday, October 6, 2011

Day 6... Defining words

        Today was a beautiful morning at the beach. The ocean was still warm, quiet and glassy blue. The sand moderately hard and the shells sparingly dotted the water's edge, perfect for a walk/run barefooted.

  • FACT #3: Yes, I prefer to run barefoot on the beach! Bad for my feet, probably, but that is a simple pleasure right now that causes we to keep going.

       Anyway, everything was perfect all except... my body didn't want to "play nice in the sandbox" this morning. My muscles are sore, my joints are stiff, my hips are tired, but I ran anyway!!!! :) While walking and pondering my stupidness this morning, I started to fill my mind with self-dought, and reality probabilities. Things like... "I will probably never actually do the race, let alone finish it!"or "we might not even be living here come March anyway, cuz we like to move around a lot". Then words started coming into my mind like ENDURANCE, MOTIVATION and DISCIPLINE. Then turning my negatives into positives, I started to define those words in my mind. What do they mean to me?

ENDURANCE:
  • the act of enduring to the end, 
  • setting goals and seeing them through,
  • repeating an action often in the hopes of getting a little bit better each time you do it. 
There is a wonderful scripture in D&C 14:7, "And, if you keep my commandments and endure to the end you shall have eternal life, which gift is the greatest of all the gifts of God". In the runners world endurance is defined as "Muscular endurance training is often trained at short bouts of moderate to high-intensity exercise, with short periods of rest in between."
 Read more: LiveStrong.com

MOTIVATION:
  • some action that causes a reaction, 
  • a goal that causes a person to attempt to achieve, 
  • a task that involves some sort of payoff in the end. 
When I think of motivation I think of Steven R.Covey's Habit #2: "Begin with the end in mind". What better motivation is that? To "Begin with the End in Mind means to begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of your desired direction and destination, and then continue by flexing your proactive muscles to make things happen". 

DISCIPLINE:
  • when you got what it takes to keep going, 
  • the fortitude and will power to reach your goals, 
  • the obedience to just make yourself do it whether you want to or not. 
Often when you look up the word discipline it is quickly followed by the word "Punishment, but I have never thought of discipline as a form of punishment. I like the definition that I came acrossed several years ago in the American Heritage Dictionary: "Training expected to produce a specific character or pattern of behavior, especially training that produces moral or mental improvement." While studying to become a teacher many years ago, one of our unit assignments was to research many different forms and ideas of classroom discipline and then formulate our own discipline method that we would use in our classroom. After much research, I began to agree with the idea and statement that I read in one of my text books entitled "The Piaget Theory" by Jean Piaget. It was stated that; "Piaget rejected the belief that children simply learn and internalize the norms for a group; he believed individuals define morality individually through their struggles to arrive at fair solutions. Given this view, Piaget suggested that a classroom teacher perform a difficult task: the educator must provide students with opportunities for personal discovery through problem solving [self discipline], rather than indoctrinating students with norms." So in the end, I came up with the only conclusion that seemed plausible to me. I was going to "LOVE' them into learning, little did I know that not everyone can be "LOVED" in the same way. Then I started having children of my own...
READ MORE: Jean Piaget

  • FACT #4: Through age and lots of experience, I have come to the absolute conclusion that we all need discipline and rules, even if it sometimes and somehow feels like punishment. 

And today my body feels like it is being punished! I am going to reward myself by going to the Farmer's Market.

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