My prayers have been answered; easy fitness that’s what I like. For Christmas we got the kids a Wii Fit/Sport. I really don’t like exercise without a purpose and have been trying to figure out how to get some  exercise, without having to run around in the rain or do to much work. I needed a solution. So I recovered our old elliptical trainer from a friend where I hoped it had been used for more than we had used it for; hanging clothes.

I set it up on the covered back deck, so that after having my morning cup of java which I am slowly managing to wean myself off, I could jump right on the trainer and do a 5-10 minutes workout a day. This worked great for the first 2 or 3 days and then I fell into my old routine. Within a few days I finally quit altogether.

Enter the Wii fit/sport, the Wii fit is a great device, it combines the fun of playing a game and doing some exercise, just the way I like it. I started off doing a little ski jumping which requires a degree of balance to pull it off and then had ago at snowball fighting and finally some boxing to get the old heart going again. It’s a surprisingly good workout and I can be sweating and breathing hard by the end of it.

The Wii fit it begins by working out your Wii fit age, this is done by putting in your date of birth, height, and a couple of other things in that help it out. Then it tells you what your Body Mass Index is and your weight. Which incidentally you can password protect to stop prying eyes from knowing what you weigh.  I was asked to do a bunch of activities like balance, agility and strength. In its nice way, it let me know my Wii Fit age which was right on the money this time (29 + 21 years).

This age moves up and down depending on your fitness and abilities, feel free if you have a Wii Fit, to post your age and progress in the comments of this post. After doing all this you are ready to setup an exercise routine, which can be done every day and combines Yoga and strength training and at the end you can have one of the fun trainings, like boxing or holla hoops added in.

So if you don’t want to exercise in the rain, but think that as part of your New Year’s resolution you should get a little fitter this might be the answer for you. I was going to do my own training video for everyone so that you could see how easy it is, but I thought that I would not subject you to this at this time. One other bonus is that you get to make your own character to represent you in the game which is kind of cool.

Whose business is it anyway? Sometimes I find my mind is full of thoughts that I get lost in. Some of them are really positive and others not quite that good. I’d like to say that I am always able to let go of the not so positive thoughts, but this is not always easy.

One of the best methods I have found for letting go of these thoughts is to divide them up and give them back to their rightful owners. There are three kinds of business:

1. Gods Business.
2. Their Business.
3. My Business.

The first kind of business is Gods Business or some higher power. I really like this kind of business because I can do nothing about it, even though sometimes I get stuck there for a while thinking I can, like earthquakes, when someone dies, the state of the world today. Yes I’d love to fix these problems in the world, but people have been trying for thousands of years and we still seem to have just as many problems as before. It could just be that this is the way it is supposed to be, so that we will learn what we need to learn which is, we don’t have any control over it anyway even though we would like to think we do.

The second kind of business is Their Business and this is anything that someone else does or thinks. Give it up, it’s not your business, Yes – it would be nice if other people thought nice things about you and that they took your advice to fix their lives but as you have probably noticed most people don’t do this until they’re ready to, and sometimes that day never comes. This happens in relationships where people spend years trying to change the other person and nothing happens, it may appear to happen for a short time by enforcement but soon they return to their old path. Until one day one realizes that this is who they are and not the fantasy of who one thought they should be. At this point we can make it Our Business.

This kind of business is my own business and I can make a change here. I have complete control over what I  think. I am at the most powerful place in the world here. I have a choice in this moment as to what I wish to focus on. Yes, the earthquake may happen, someone may not like me or even be the way I think they should be and I don’t need to take it on, it’s their business. I can get stuck in other people’s business or I can let go of it because it’s not mine and by doing this I create a lot less suffering in my world and those around me.

Being in my business allows me to make a choice. For instance if I was downhill skiing and there was an avalanche, I could choose to try and outrun it or find a tree to climb. Not that I recommend it, but you could choose to stand there and see what happened and I’m sure there are a lot of other options too. The avalanche happened but what I do with it is up to me. It’s my business.

Do it now or you probably won’t do it. I think procrastination happens to most of us, we need to get that something done, but instead of doing it right away we put it off until later and then later comes and we put it off again. The problem with the procrastination strategy is that it’s taking up space in our minds. Usually there is another something that comes up and takes up a bit more space. Soon our lives are full of little things that take up a lot of space; they then turn into mind clutter and even become overwhelming and stressful.

I did a project for a client in upstate New York a few years ago; this fellow was really interesting and was reputed to be worth a lot of money. We were putting together a log home on his 700 acre property. He had the basement already poured when we got there and we started to put the house together on the basement walls. Everything was going well until we got to the front of the house which had a couple of turrets on it, when we discovered that the basement wall had been  poured 18” too far out and the house would not fit the wall. The project was looking like it was going to stall, with about 15 of us standing around and the money clock ticking. The owner jumped on the phone and called the people who had poured the basement; they were not being very helpful and were trying to take no responsibility even though it was in black and white that it was their mistake. He hung up the phone and came back to us not very happy.  He then said “so let’s solve this now, so we can move on”; within 5 minutes we came up with a solution to the issue and were moving again.

This happened several times throughout my week there, and usually within 5 minutes we were up and running again, there was no procrastination which really impressed me. I also noticed that within 5 minutes of each event the gentleman seemed happy again. I asked him how he was able to stay sane and happy among all the mishaps and disasters that went on. His response was, that if he did not deal with situations as they came up he would go insane, but by dealing with each event as it came up he only ever had one thing to deal with and then he could let it go, I was very impressed by this line of thinking. This person not only built houses but developed shopping malls and other large projects, so he had a lot of experience in this field.

Since then I’ve done my best to follow his advice, I try to deal with whatever comes along as soon as possible and preferably right away. If it is a fix-it job around the house or workshop that takes less than 5 minutes, then I do it right away so it is out of my hair.

This is present moment living at its finest and as we can only deal with one thought at a time, it just makes sense to do deal with what is in front of us and not leave it for another day. An area that is especially important to do right away is with relationships, were we can imagine all kinds of things without talking to the person/person’s involved and come up with all kinds of excuses not to make a communication because we fear the outcome. If it is an unfavourable outcome when we communicate with someone, at least now we can move on and make other choices. If it is a favourable one, then we didn’t spend a lot of time making up stories about something that was not real in the first place.