7am alarm, got up, fed the kitties, got my coffee and half a pumpkin bar, took vitamins, texted spouse some good morning nonsense, fixing to go for a walk.

Spouse apparently has to give the others at hogwarts a powerpoint presentation on himself so he was scrounging for a good photo of us. We are not photo people. I think we look pretty good in person but neither of us take good pictures. Spouse always looks like someone leveled a shotgun at him and said "smile, varmint!", and I'm not much better. I have a candid shot our sister in law took on the california beach 3 years ago where we are both happy and relaxed, but we look scruffy. I have one where we were on the train to visit denali national park 4 years ago - spouse is asleep with his mouth open and I'm wide eyed and excited. That's about it. No wedding photo because that day was such a disaster I couldn't stand to have a visual reminder. It would have been us taking a selfie anyway. So I told spouse when he's done with hogwarts we should dress up and take a bunch of photos so we get one really good one and then we won't have to do it again for at least a decade. He's game.

You know what this means? Yeah, it means I need to go for walkies and stop eating garbage so I can decrease my mass. Theoretically we should both be in decent shape in 5 months.

One of the things I've been thinking about during the past year or so is how achieving long term, big picture goals breaks down to daily action. You know the old saying - "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."

The individual days might be very discouraging because a person can't see any progress in 24 hours. Maybe a person learns a small fragment of something or decides not to eat that donut, but most days don't offer the epic sense of accomplishment we crave like addicts (unless you get into video games). Even not eating the donut is a letdown because in the very short term, who cares if you eat a donut or not. The donut is tasty. One donut isn't going to move the scale much. Why deny yourself the donut, honestly? So every day is a tiny dull battle of inconsequential (seeming) decisions that have no tangible payoff. Over and over. I think I am absolute shit at the daily battles. I think I prioritize the "big picture" accomplishments so much that I fail to recognize and value the boring daily efforts. Or I expect too much and then disappoint myself, so I never get a satisfying payoff reward. Like there is something true about imagining your creative self as an inner child and trying to be a good parent to that part of yourself, and not an abusive parent. You can harm your own creative self with abuse and lack of reward and make it impossible to function. You can't measure yourself by those "golden palace" accomplishments in the daily short term, if you want real success. It's counterproductive. Like yoda says, "All his life has he looked away to the future, the horizon. Never his mind on where he was - what he was doing. Adventure. Excitement. A Jedi craves not these things."

So I've been thinking about how I can shift focus to the daily scale of accomplishment versus the grand, big picture scale. How can I foster tiny success in the 16 hours I spend conscious in a day, and then grow that into bigger successes that bear fruit. I don't want to micromanage myself and make myself anxious or guilty (lately I have been a little bit too successful at not making myself feel guilty). I don't want to fill the role of shitty abusive mentor to myself, yelling and ripping up the little things that make me happy. I need more carrots and no sticks. So how do I strengthen and encourage my inner creative self on the scale of minutes or hours. It's easy to picture weeks or months, very hard to grasp on the scale of say, the next 15 minutes. The war is waged on the scale of hours. What do we do to go to bed at night feeling like we've won the war?

Step one: We get up and knock out some accomplishments right away, so if the rest of the day gets torpedoed, at least we started out on the right foot. Right now, that means we get some exercise and we do our inktober (for the month of october).

Step two: I don't know what step two is, I have barely figured out step one. Step two is probably house chores, though. Or maybe sitting down and making goals for the day. I work better when my surroundings are in order, so step two is probably taking time to lay some proper ground work.

Step three: ???

We'll try this for a few days and see how it feels. I know I'm taking everything down to base delta zero, but it that's what it takes, then that's what it takes. Break it down, build it up.

I have to go for walks now.