For as long as I’ve known, I haven’t had the best health. Granted, I’m fortunate enough to still be able to walk and talk just fine with minimal scarring all over me. However, my blood has literally spelled a sort of impending doom in the form of high cholesterol and high triglyceride levels ever since I was 12. And when I say that, I'm talking about levels that rivaled my 40-year-old father then.

Thankfully, I’m glad to say that things have gotten better for me mentally and physically speaking as I’ve managed to get back in the routine of exercising and partaking in intermittent fasting. With all of this mind though and while on my fetch quest for a decent topic for my next article, I stumbled upon an essay by Haruki Murakami called “The Running Novelist” where the acclaimed author reminisces about when he first decided to take writing seriously and get his life together through the simple act of running. As I was reading the essay, I couldn’t help but think and feel inspired after reading to, quite frankly, get my shit together when it comes to writing because even though I’m still a young man, I am not getting any younger.

“That year, the Yakult Swallows, the perennial underdog, won the pennant and went on to defeat the Hankyu Braves in the Japan Series. I was really excited by this, and I attended several games at Korakuen Stadium. (Nobody had actually imagined that the Swallows would win, so their home venue, Jingu Stadium, had already been taken over by college baseball.) It was a particularly gorgeous autumn. The sky was clear and the gingko trees in front of the Meiji Memorial Gallery were more golden than I’d ever seen them. This was the last fall of my twenties.”

I’ve fallen out of routine with my writing endeavors at the time of writing this—but before this realization I’d managed to remain militant with that habit. Now, of course, this was all while balancing work responsibilities, building back my physical stuff following the winter often limiting travel options to the gym and therefore taxing my body and trickling down to affect my mental as well, and getting used to the rest of my life. But somewhere along the line during my seasonal dip in overall activity, so too did my writing frequency.

Not being consistent specifically with my writing regimen worries me for several reasons—perpetual imposter syndrome, an intensified anxiety towards my own mortality when thinking about the possibility of never having made anything of creative worth by the time I drop dead (given my health, I reckon that I have at least until I hit 40 before I get busy dying), and simply living up to what I assume a lot of my friends and family often think (probably) in that I simply can’t do what I say that I’m going to do. Thankfully, against my mother’s wishes, I am also a petty motherfucker who hates being told what they’re able and unable to do—the conditional type of asshole who would walk through a pool of magma, Terminator-style, regardless of the pain I felt while wading in lava just so my skeletal remains can look you in the eyes with a flare that spells “You’re wrong” before perishing into burnt ash and gristle within the fiery orange sludge. Though, if I’m being very truthful, I probably think about all of that just because I’m insecure on the inside—insecure that I will never amount to reaching my potential and beyond if I don’t find a way to match the grueling routines followed by the likes of Murakami or Stephen King to get anything worthwhile done.

“I was more interested in having finished the book than in whether or not it would ever see the light of day.”

At this point, you’re probably wondering what all of this ranting has to do with fitness and, to be quite honest, so am I. I will start by saying that, somehow, I managed to get back into a routine with fitness quicker than I have with my writing routine. My goals with that are simple: try to lose weight or, at the very least, find a way to get rid of my winter beer belly. As I’ve grown a little bit more with my fitness journey though, I’ve opted to focus more on the latter method of mirror progress as opposed to cutting weight. Sure, I may be overweight for a short-stack but at least I can say that it’s because I earned my dump truck ass with many days of leg presses and squats. Naturally, when paired with intermittent fasting, something that I’ve done before a few years ago for about nine months, moving around and breathing just became better along with attention and memory—but I wasn’t able to write.

See, writing is very much an act like running, lifting, swimming, sparring, or any other physical activity. Maintaining a level of regularity is crucial for any sort of progress whether it be general learning or, in my case, improvement. Of course, life happens but we all find a way to adapt. If you break a bone, the bone grows back; if you cut yourself, your body scars and seals the wound—but we will always have the daunting task of finding a way to muster up the courage and grit to get used to what seems foreign to move forward.

I don’t know what’s currently stopping me from writing recently but I can only hope to find out sooner than later. In the meantime, all I can do is try and buy my brain some time by staying reasonably fit until it comes back from a most unpleasant sabbatical. I mean, the worst thing that can come out of this is that I somehow find those six-pack abs I wanted when I was in high school.

“The main thing was not the speed or the distance so much as running every day, without fail.”

Thank you for reading this edition of The Morning Owl. If you liked what you saw here, please leave a like, subscribe, leave a comment, and share this newsletter. Until we meet again, do take care.

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