How To Blow The Ole Engine Out

I think I’m going to be taking it easy for a little while.  I spent the first couple of weeks of the month trying to get myself back into high gear, but I think I ended up just spinning my wheels and effing up my spiritual connection.  My ego is starting to resurface.  Nothing I’ve really acted on to my detriment – yet – but I can feel myself getting close.

I was talking to my old man this evening and he analogized the part of what I was telling him to which he was actually listening to my grandfather’s bit of wisdom that it’s important to take a car out and red-line the engine every once in a while to blow out the carburetor.  You know, work out all the junk and accumulation that comes with just driving around the neighborhood.  While I think my old man probably wasn’t picking up what I was putting down, his analogy still holds.  I fully believe that it’s important to blow the engine out on a regular basis – both with my car and with myself – but it has to be done properly.  What I’ve been trying to do (back to the analogy) is red-line my engine while I’m still driving around the neighborhood.  And that’s not the best way to do it.  In fact, that’s probably the best way to throw a rod or get the engine to seize or some such other bad thing that happens to a car when you’re up- and down-shifting too much and too quickly.

Blowing the engine out means doing it on the highway – the blowout has to be sustained, or the cleaning isn’t thorough.  Revving the engine and chirping the tires around the neighborhood isn’t the answer.  Sure, drive around the neighborhood a bit to get the engine warmed up – there’s no point in blowing out a cold engine: that leads to bad stuff too.  Once it’s warm, though, it’s got to get on the highway and spend some time at speed.

I’ve been doing all the wrong things.  I can see the highway ahead of me (read:  work and life getting very busy), but I’m not there yet.  And my engine’s still cold.  I need to spend some time driving around the neighborhood – which means getting back to basics:  setting up a solid routine so that my up- and down-shifts are smooth and regular.  Once that gets comfortable, I can start to pick up some speed and push the tach a bit here and there.  Once everything’s running pretty smoothly, I’ll be able to get out there and blow out my engine – a sustained and controlled burn which can only then be truly cleansing.

That means I need to back off a bit from trying to pack too many things into my life right now.  I need to concentrate on laying down the big blocks of my schedule first.  I need to be comfortable and regular with them before I can start adding more (smaller) pieces to it.  That means regularizing my work schedule as best I can, nourishing my body on a regular basis and not killing myself every Saturday when I hike (read:  slow the pace down, Ted, it’s not a race to the summit), taking care of my evening commitments and making sure I leave myself time at the end of the day to decompress (read and meditate).

Once I’m comfortable in this schedule (which really shouldn’t take more than a couple of days), I can start to add copywriting and other things back into my evenings (slowly).  As time passes, by the time I realize I’m blowing my engine out, it’ll be one helluva fun ride.