Discipline is not my strength. I have perfected the art of giving up when things get tough. When I started blogging 2 1/2 years ago I didn’t think I’d still be posting now. One of the reasons I’ve been successful with consistently blogging (vs. say, exercising) is because after we were evacuated from Egypt, I saw how important my blog was to remembering our time there. Then when we moved back overseas, to Oman, I vowed to continue to be consistent in my blogging and set a goal of posting something every day.
I hit my goal (or got close enough to call it successful — I think I only missed 20 days out of 365). In that time, blogging became part of my daily rhythm. And kind of like exercise, some days I felt like doing it and other days I didn’t. I haven’t figured out the best way to continue this blog now that we’re in Bahrain, so while I don’t have the goal of daily blogging right now, I know if I don’t keep at it daily or every other day, I’ll just quit doing it.
I was thinking about discipline/consistency as we were budgeting for 2013. Before we moved overseas we cut our expenses dramatically to save up for our year of travel. This past year we spent as we wished, traveled as much as we could, and didn’t worry about saving. Now that we’re back in “real life” it’s time to start saving again: for our next car, a down payment on a house (less than 5 years to retirement!), future travel, etc. God bless automatic transfers! We set them all up yesterday and 18 months from now, when we leave Bahrain, we should have the money saved to get started in a new place. If the money didn’t disappear immediately when it hit our account, we wouldn’t be nearly as successful with saving (see the first sentence of this post). Too bad I can’t set up an exercise program the same way . . . program my body to automatically do it, no questions asked. Preferably while I’m asleep.
Happy 2013 from the Bahrain Fort!
(I know we look like a post-card perfect happy family, but we’re all overtired and crabby and spent the time hiking around threatening to take away all electronics for the rest of Christmas vacation . . .)