You can outwork everyone around you, but without sufficient rest and recovery, your success may be short-lived.
There is no success without hard work and in order to have more than you do today, you must do more than you did yesterday.
However, your ability to sustain your output of effort and to enjoy the fruits of your labor is largely determined by the quality of your rest and recovery.
You can push your body and mind as hard as you want to, but be aware that you can only do this for so long before they shut down or break to demand that you rest.
Recovery from this will most likely set your progress back much more than if you moved a little slower and pushed a little less hard to allow for rest and recovery in your schedule.
Success without longevity and sustainability, after all, can hardly be considered success.
We brag about how busy we are, how early we wake up, or how late we stay up at night, as if we are all competing to get the least amount of rest, to have the most stress, and to spend the least amount of time with our loved ones.
What does not get talked about, however, is the exhaustion, the loneliness, and the unhappiness that this lifestyle creates.
Meanwhile, we should be bragging about getting a good night’s sleep, eating well, exercising regularly, maintaining healthy relationships, and having peace in our hearts.
I have been writing a blog post a day, every single day without fail (as far as I can recall), for over a year now.
Before that, I was writing a blog post a day, nearly every single day, for quite a while longer.
I enjoy it.
It’s good for me and I hope that it is good for other people as well.
My posts are mostly ‘notes to self’ that I share publicly in case someone else needs to read what I needed to write.
But, I need to give myself a break.
I need a day off – we all do.
I need to rest my mind for a little while each week and focus outwardly on some of the aspects of life that I neglect while living too much in my head.
For this reason, I have decided to take Sunday as a day of rest – at least with regards to my writings – and just relax a bit.
Life is busy.
It goes by quickly.
And, quite frankly, while I do enjoy the ritualistic discipline of writing every day, I don’t want this blog to feel like work (it doesn’t and I would like to keep it that way).
Truth be told, one of the main reasons for my writing is to leave a sort of breadcrumb trail of ideas and principles to live by in case I am not around someday (none of us is promised tomorrow), but I have recently come to realize that if the act of writing interferes with my direct and personal attention to her now, I have missed the point.
So, this will be my last Sunday blog post for the foreseeable future.
I’ll be back on Monday.
For now, I am going to read my daughter some stories and tuck her into bed.
P.S. I realize that it is somewhat arrogant to assume that anyone will notice that there is one less blog post in the world each week, but if even one person reads my writing and finds some kind of value in it, I feel obligated to let them (you) know that I have not simply disappeared. I am here. You are not alone. I am just taking a bit more time each week to do put into action some of the things that I put into writing.
We often hear that if we win the morning, we will win the day.
As a general rule, this is certainly true.
How we wake up, the time we wake up, and what we do upon awakening and in the first few hours of our day sets the tone for everything that will happen after.
If we give ourselves time to think, time to reflect, and time to work on our goals, ourselves, and our creative projects first thing in the morning, we start the day with a win.
If, on the other hand, we start our day with resistance, fighting off the need to wake up, procrastinating on the things that must be done, and delaying the inevitable, we will find ourselves constantly on our back foot, irritable and hurried, and struggling to catch up while other people’s priorities take over our time, energy, and attention.
We get to decide, every day, what kind of day we will have based on what kind of morning we give ourselves.
This decision is not easily made in the morning hours, however.
Nor should it be.
This is a decision we should and often do make many hours before, the night before in fact.
In reality, how we wake up, the time we wake up, and the energy and attitude we wake up with are largely determined by how, when, and in what way we go to sleep.
Winning the morning might win the day, but winning the evening wins the morning.
Success and failure are largely determined by preparation.
Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.
Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Bodyand Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh unless otherwise noted.
Meditations on God 