Blogging is a strange thing. It’s hard to imagine the necessity of advertising our lives and thoughts to strangers, or even those close to you.

For me, I see blogging as an exercise of discipline and reflection, and one ultimately of sharing lessons and joy.

Anyways, I’ve recently became increasingly drawn to the Buddhist notion of “entering the stream“. It is immensely difficult to even conceptualize living the notion in practice. And mindfulness is an uncanny ambition for the twenty-first century, where we are bombarded with messages that compete for our attention, time, resources, emotive abilities and feelings of (in)securities.

But for me, this is an especially interesting notion. As a life long learner, I am constantly drawn from one discipline to another, hopping from one hobby to another. It seems that the best thing would be to embrace these distractions in a deep and meaningful way, rather to constrain myself to the notion that I should not be interested in being good at many things. I don’t consider myself undisciplined. I rarely stop being interested in something. I just find it a bit difficult to be able to invest that crucial amount of time to becoming good at something, when I would like to excel at so many things.

That being said, I therefore came up with the concept of setting myself monthly challenges. These challenges will focus on one activity at a time. The point is to demonstrate to myself the ability for me to achieve once I’ve put my mind to it and to put a gentle stop to all the multiple competing priorities outside family, friendship, work and the absolute fundamentals.

For the first month, I want to focus on my physical fitness. Evidently this is something that should become a lifetime habit, but I would really like to see to what extent my body can change in the span of a month. I think of it as an interesting experiment and intellectual challenge.