We talked about writing. Since that topic encompasses everything else that we both live and breathe, the conversation covered a lot of ground.

She talked about inspiration and the nocturnal activities of her particular muse. There was a voice that came to her one night to dictate notes for years’ worth of writing projects. I speculated about the creative unconscious, the unknown workings of the mute machinery of our brains that collects, organizes, catalogs, and stores images, sounds, smells, emotions, and abstract ideas and then assembles them into dreams, long-term memories, and all the wonders of fantasy. I wondered why she was so eager to give the credit for her brilliance to something outside herself.

I told her about the lessons I was learning from helping other people figure out how not to hide their lights under bushels. She remarked that I seem to get better and better at giving advice without wasting a lot of time listening to what I’m saying.

I told her a long-winded story about losing weight and finding discipline, and of my endless quest to apply what I’d learned to my writing practice. Simple rules. Do something every day. Everything counts. And the new mantra that I’d picked up from a fitness podcast called Fat 2 Fit Radio—If you want to be fit, emulate the diet and habits of a fit person. Don’t promise you’ll eat better tomorrow or that you’ll go back to the gym next week.

There’s a broader lesson in that axiom, I think, for the writer, the artist, or anyone who aspires to do more, to be better, to claim his gift and follow its implications. When do you want it? Someday, or now? I gave her a homework assignment—write 400 words on the topic of our lunch date. She dared me to do the same. I carried the assignment home, took it for a seven-mile run around the park, and tucked it under my pillow when I went to bed. When the next work day was nearly done, I wrote this blog post. But I could have written only this:

Start living your life TODAY as the person that you ultimately want to be.

A very late start—delayed by rain, I didn’t get to the park to start my walk tonight until almost 7:30. Afterwards, I made a long-overdue trip to a couple of grocery stores: first Whole Foods for coffee, then to Kroger for everything else on the shopping list. By the time I drove home, cleaned myself up, put the groceries put away, and had a bite to eat, it was nearly midnight.

Instead of trying to write a substantial blog post, I decided to use what energy I had left to look around online for a few more images to decorate the header area of this site. There’s some wonderful free photography out there. I found all of the images below (and many more) at public-domain-image.com:

I’ve added about a dozen new images to the collection of photos that are displayed at random in the header. If you visit enough pages of the site—or click the header bar to refresh it enough times—you’ll eventually see them all. Click on any of the thumbnails above to see a larger, uncropped version of the image.

When you don’t have the strength to do a lot, do a little. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, find a way to make progress any way you can.

I’ve written elsewhere about my exercise rules and about the idea of making a game out of achieving goals.

I play a lot of games in my exercise routine. I make up arbitrary rules and give myself extra points on an imaginary scoreboard for achievements above and beyond the normal daily routine. I’m not always sure whether these tricks help keep me motivated, or just give my idle mind something to do.

Here’s a rule I made up tonight:

• Extra points are assessed for walking on a day so humid that you finish the outing dripping wet from head to toe.

Come to think of it, a lot of my scorekeeping rules are related to weather conditions:

• Extra points when circumstances require walking in the blazing-hot afternoon sun.
• A few extra points for walking under threat of rain.
• More extra points for walking in the rain.
• Even more extra points if the source of rain is a hurricane.
• Extra points for walking when it’s very cold.
• Still more extra points for walking when it’s very cold and raining.
• Many, many extra points—and Facebook bragging rights—for walking in the snow.

When I was laid up on the couch a couple of months ago recovering from eye surgery, I couldn’t play my regular game. For a period of several weeks, I couldn’t drive, or complete a full lap around the park even if I begged a ride there. So I improvised a temporary rule: a late-night stroll to Ella Boulevard and back would suffice as a day’s exercise. Just as soon as I was able, I started adding extra blocks to the minimum daily requirement.

Have fun with the rules of your game. Let them inspire you, motivate you, goad you on, or give you something to brag about. Adapt them to your needs. Make the game a lot of fun, and you’ll never want to quit playing.

I’ve written a couple of times before about Rule #2: Everything Counts. Today will be one of those days when I invoke Rule #2. I put in a long work day, then packed my bags and took off for Galveston. I didn’t get here until after 10 p.m., ate a late dinner, and then settled in to write. As soon as I publish this post, I’ll go for a walk. It’ll be after midnight, so I only plan to walk the four blocks down to the Seawall, then maybe a few blocks along the beach and back. That’s okay, because in this game of getting some exercise every day, everything counts.

I don’t entirely grasp the psychological mechanisms at work in Rule #2, but I know that it works. Maybe it’s a sort of mental safety valve to keep my obsessive tendencies from reaching critical pressure. I’ve also tried to understand it with the metaphor of a truce: maybe everything counts is a way of mediating between two warring impulses in my character—the one that wants to be healthy and fit, and the one that would rather relax and take it easy.

But the practical effects of everything counts are clear. On the down days, the impossibly long days, the icy-cold days, the sick-in-bed days, the surgery recovery days, it’s a compromise that lets me get to the end of my day still able to say, “But I got some exercise.”

More often than not, when I reach the exercise part of the day ready to invoke Rule #2, I find that I have a bit more left in the tank than I thought. Instead of walking down to the corner and back, I walk a mile. Or instead of walking a mile, I stretch it to two. Sometimes I discover that I have a whole hour of exercise energy left after all.

Maybe it’s as simple as this: Half of what it takes to exercise is the will to begin. Let everything counts be your safety valve, the truce terms in your internal struggle, or the little white lie that gets you to the starting line. Then do as much as you can of what you came to do. It counts.

A few days ago, I mentioned the rules of the exercise game that I’ve been playing:

On Wednesday, someone who’s been reading this blog lately said to me, “I just can’t exercise every day.”

I replied, “I’m not saying that you should. It’s your life, and it’s your game. You make up the rules. Just make sure that it’s working toward the goals you want to accomplish, that it’s sufficiently challenging to keep you interested, and that it’s possible to win.”

Up until today, I haven’t felt the need to invoke Rule #2. I’ve put serious time and effort into the previous posts. But it’s been a busy, hectic week. I’ve worked long hours all week, and now I’m coming down to the deadline for Day 9.

So tonight, in the spirit of “Everything counts,” and in lieu of a more substantial message, I’m going to issue a challenge to you:

It’s your life; it’s your game. Design a game that you’re willing to play for a specified period of time. Make it about one or more aspects of your life that you’d like to enrich. Example: “Every day for the next two weeks, I will walk for 30 minutes, ride my bicycle, OR spend 10 minutes meditating.” Or it could be, “For each of the next 10 days, I will read at least five pages of something that’s just for fun, and I will eat more fruits and vegetables.”

Be clear on the rules. How much bike-riding counts? What do you mean by “more fruits and vegetables”? Write your rules down.

Tell me the rules of your game by leaving a comment at the bottom of this page. I’ll check back with you later to see how it’s going!

The first time I got serious about exercise, I became a member of the YMCA in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. The Y offered an incentive program for runners. They gave out 6 x 9 index cards on which you could record your miles by inking in a grid of 500 tiny boxes. When you filled the card, you turned it in with $5 and got a downtown ymca 500‑mile club T‑shirt.

Image: m_bartosch / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I filled up two cards, so I also got a 1,000‑mile club T‑shirt before I left Knoxville. I worked hard for those cheap T‑shirts. Even though the card program relied on the honor system, I scrupulously discounted fractional miles and pushed myself harder every time I neared the end of another row of boxes.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2004. I was walking semi-regularly at Memorial Park in Houston with my friend Scott. One day Scott said, “We should set a regular walking routine.” Up to that point in my life, I’d always considered myself allergic to routine—it seemed to me that putting anything enjoyable on a timetable was the surest way to drain the fun out of it. But I liked walking with Scott, so I agreed to a schedule. We would walk every weekday morning at 7:00, every weekend morning at 8:00.

We built a fail-safe into the system by agreeing to wait only briefly for the other person to arrive. After 10 minutes, we were to assume he wasn’t coming and commence the walk. And we added another rule to keep the game uncomplicated: if one of us didn’t show up, there was no need to explain, to apologize, or to call to find out if we were still on for tomorrow. We were always still on for tomorrow.

These few rules made the game surprisingly effective. By the end of 2004, I was routinely walking five or six days a week. Scott had other commitments that eventually broke up our walking partnership, but I kept going, at one point racking up 13 months without a day off.

I’d been telling myself for a long time that I had the kind of body that needs to exercise every day, but I’d never managed to find the commitment to do so until it became a challenging—but winnable—game. So here’s my message for today:

Whatever you’d like to improve about your life, try making it into a game. Challenge yourself to exercise every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and then write down what you did on a calendar, or enter it into an online journal, or an Excel spreadsheet, or on a homemade scorecard stuck to the refrigerator door. It’s your game. Make up your own rules. Then play it to win.

Remember, though, that the game must be challenging, or you’ll get bored. But as one of my favorite coaches, Mattison Grey, explains, it also has to be a game you can win, or you’ll get discouraged. Later, you can change the rules when you’re ready for a bigger challenge.

My own game is always evolving to include higher stakes, extra challenges, and new twists to keep it fun, but two basic rules have remained constant for the last five years or so. I’ll tell you more about these in some upcoming posts: