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.

It took me 33 days, but I’ve made it to the end of the July Project. The main objective of this month-long blogging initiative was to devote time and attention every day to thinking and writing about my efforts to move more and eat better. Even on the three July days when I didn’t post anything, the subject was always in my thoughts, so I’m calling that goal substantially accomplished.

Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Another stated aim was to collect ideas that I can reflect on at some later date when I find myself struggling to move forward, and to share those ideas with anyone else for whom they might be useful. A few people have told me that these posts inspired them to work harder on their own fitness or writing goals, so in that respect, the project has been an unqualified success. Many thanks to everyone who’s been reading!

Will I return to these posts later for reflection, to see how they’re holding up over time, to check whether their lessons still feel true? I don’t know. Here at the end of the project, looking back seems much less important than looking forward. So here’s the last message I’ll offer for the July Project:

When you reach one of your goals, take a moment to enjoy your accomplishment. But after you’ve learned whatever there was to learn from this chapter of your life, keep moving forward. What you can still do today contains more power than a whole month that’s over and done. On to the next thing!

Once in a while, everything comes together to create the perfect walk. There was an afternoon in Los Angeles in January of last year. I’d spent the day in a conference listening to brilliant people talk about their hopes for the future of human progress. I was high on contagious optimism and altruism. One of my new friends offered to show me the way to Griffith Park. I followed her through rush-hour traffic up into the hills, then she showed me where to park and where the running trail started. As I walked and jogged, the sun went down over the hills on one side and the San Gabriel Mountains faded to deep purple on the other. James Taylor sang “That’s Why I’m Here” on my iPod. I break into a grin from ear to ear / and suddenly it’s perfectly clear. It was an ecstatic moment. I’m sure that my feet never touched the ground.

And I recall an early spring day at Memorial Park in some recent year. Dappled sunlight was coming through the deciduous trees, just beginning to fill in with tender yellow-green leaves. The breeze was warm, and I knew it would only be a few weeks until it was too hot to walk at midday. But on this day, the sun felt great on my pasty-white skin. The soundtrack: Indigo Girls, “The Wood Song.” No one gets to miss the storm of what will be / just holding on for the ride. And for a moment, maybe 30 seconds, everything seemed to make complete and perfect sense. Friends I’d made, and lost, the ebb and flow of my career and my love life, the passage of time, the inevitability of change—I understood it all. And then I guess the sun went behind a cloud, and I was back to trudging along on sore feet.

But these moments and a few others are always with me. They remind me that the reward for hard work comes in many forms. There’s the delight of buying the next smaller size of clothing, the knowledge that I’m steadily improving my health, and once in a while, moments of ecstatic happiness.

In writing and exercise, sometimes there are moments of pure, unadulterated joy, and no amount of struggle seems too much to endure.

But on the other hand…

I’m thrilled when people comment on my exercise regimen—or my blog—and say that I’ve inspired them, or that I make it look easy. But I wonder sometimes if “making it look easy” is doing a disservice to people who are working hard on their own projects for self-improvement. So tonight I want to come clean—it ain’t always easy.

I spent an hour last night trying to come up with a blog post. It was the end of a very long week with mountains of work, many hours of writing, two rowing classes, and a workshop to finish preparing and to teach. In that hour, I banged out about a thousand words, but around 1 a.m. I conceded that I was too exhausted to write anything coherent. I resolved either to write two posts today, or to be content with trailing a day behind for the rest of the July Project. I went to bed disappointed that I couldn’t deliver the goods.

The exercise routine presents a different kind of challenge. An uncomfortable, reluctant, grouchy six-mile walk gets the job done just as much as a graceful, eager, enthusiastic six-mile walk. The only audience I’m trying to impress with exercise is myself, so quality isn’t an issue in the same way it is in writing. But a rough walk still has consequences. It affects my energy level, my sleep, and how much enthusiasm I can muster the next day.

Last weekend, I went out for a late walk in Galveston and got caught in a squall. When I turned around to head back to where I’d started from, the wind blew sand into my face. I started jogging to get the walk over with faster. My eyes squinted tight against the sand, I tripped over the ruins of someone’s sandcastle, landed hard on one heel, then stumbled for a few paces to avoid ending up face-down on the beach. I decided to abandon the treacherous sand for the stability of the Seawall.

I don’t know whether my graceless sand-dancing or jogging on a 17-foot-thick slab of concrete was to blame, but I woke up the next day with a sore lower back. I’ve been treating it all week with stretches, ibuprofen, and generous application of the mantra “I’m sure this has nothing to do with my age.”

In exercise as in writing, sometimes it’s a struggle. Do your best to get through it.

But on the other hand…

In some of her workshops, my friend and sometime coach Mattison Grey has offered a theory that everyone is about either fame, money, or winning, and that making this distinction can help you figure out how to help people get what they want.

I don’t know whether that idea holds water for everybody. I can’t speak for people who are about money or fame, and it seems to me that there might be all kinds of other things to be about—love, pleasure, or security, for instance. But as Mattison explained it to me, since my orientation is toward winning, the way for me to reach any goal I’ve set is to turn it into a game I can win. And that suggestion, at least, rings true for me.

That’s what I did in the early days of my current exercise regimen. I made it into a game with two simple rules:

1. Do something every day.

and

2. Everything counts.

As the years of everyday exercise have piled up, I’ve made the game more challenging with extra conditions and quotas. Right now, for example, I’m going twice around Memorial Park every day. I may not keep up that pace when the weather turns hot, but for now, that’s another rule I follow.

I’ve applied the “make a game of it” approach to other areas of my life, too. For most of the last two years, I’ve set a daily writing quota of 3,000 words. Sometimes I go for weeks at a time chalking up 3,000 words per day. Sometimes I don’t do so well. I’m better at walking than I am at writing, at least as far as the underlying discipline to practice is concerned.

In additional to maintaining some ongoing routines, I’ve also gotten in the habit of assigning myself special monthly projects in areas of life where I’d like to create some change. These projects are bigger games with more demanding rules. The March Project includes this objective (among others):

Post something to one of my blogs every day.

I was doing well until last Thursday, when I started having trouble with my laptop battery. It’s refusing to hold a charge for very long. To complicate matters, I had plans to spend the weekend in Galveston with friends. I took along my Windows laptop instead of my Mac. I completed my 3,000-word quota on two of the three days, but between the unfamiliar machine, spending the weekend in a house full of people, a lot of distractions, a few alcoholic beverages, and limited Internet connectivity, I didn’t manage to post anything to my blogs all weekend.

Should I give up at this point and call the March Project a loss? Until I hit the bump in the road, things were going great. I’d racked up 14 blog posts in 11 days, and that doesn’t include five short updates that could be counted if I were to adopt a very literal interpretation of “post something every day.”

No, I think I’d rather forget the weekend and look forward instead. so here’s a little trick to designing a game you can win: sometimes you have to change the rules in the middle of the game. I’m going to cut myself some slack and let my average of one post per day satisfy the terms of the March Project. Is that cheating? Maybe.

But the larger goal of posting something to one of my blogs every day was to demand more from my writing practice. And I’m not ready to quit that game.