On Friday May 13, 2016 I missed my daily pushups, something I had been doing without miss since around the 4th of July, 2012 – a daily habit to create a daily win in life so as to not be hypocritical having advised the practice to my best friend.
Going back further, I had initially started the daily pushups in the summer of 2008, stopping for a decent amount of my senior year in high school preceding the restart in summer 2012.
2012-2021 I had one missed day of pushups.
Assuming I didn’t do them, I didn’t give benefit of the doubt.
Today I hit the five year mark without missing one.
With Certainty.
Of the last 13 years I’ve done them daily for more than 12 – you could average this out to maybe two days off a month throughout the whole period.
With what I know now I’d never have stopped for the maybe semester of school, and I’d have missed zero days, not the maybe – I’m not exaggerating – maybe 12 days in 12 years.
(The first three and change run was around 8-12 misses, a few missed a year.)
It’d be 13 years unbroken.
Daily pushups over time became a practice of high value.
At 14 I was doing them to make sense of the world in which my grandpa had just died.
Telling myself that “if I don’t put in my true 100% here and now on these two sets it could be death for myself or for those I care about in the future”.
A survival mode lense on daily PT opted in, self chosen at 14 years old.
My arms were shaking on those sets.
The small glass of water from my grandma’s fridge following the nightly 2&2 sets tasted real good.
(I’d never before, or for the most part since went that far to true 100%. It was two sets of pushups and two sets of situps at that point, the only two exercises I knew, from having taken karate.)
As a fat 14 year old I had taken my first step in self betterment.
I’d stopped part of my senior year of high school.
Stopping a positive is always a negative. Just as starting a negative is always a negative.
I started back up Summer 2012, a lost “adult”, a young Man struggling to see a way in a messed up world.
Where I was at mentally, my friend was worse!
The ssris and shit prescribed by the medical establishment, supported/enforced by his own mother were smothering his soul!
The suburban ennui, his hot blonde neighbor (our age, biker dad) was doing meth!
As we walked those Cali hills talking, I stopped him, and suggested the practice as a way to win every day in the world.
I remember the exact spot. The beat up car, bush, the trimmed shrub, the sidewalk…
I haven’t heard from him in years. I pray he’s doing well.
I hope he’s 28, doing well, not 6′ under.
I get more than the physical out of my pushups, they too to me are metaphysical – I’m pushing up against the negatives of the world.
Up down up down, an action in positivity.
The world can’t keep me down!
Up down up down – I stand up!
My ritual.
It’s getting done regardless.
A win every day.
I’ll never stop.