It’s never the moments that are good that test your character, it’s always the ones that challenges us – that force us to handle ourselves in the best of ways – that define our future.

As the seasons change, my moods change. Maybe I am just a little more connected to the Earth than I ever knew, or maybe it is something else entirely. I have always found the months of October, November, and December to be my most introspective months, ones that I dive deeper and farther into my soul than the months that preceded them. The weather gets colder, the plans start to die, but this year looks like something completely different than the previous.

This year, things are being birthed while everything else around me is dying.

Maybe it’s like shedding a new skin. These past 100 days have changed my life in ways that I never could have imagined, and after a day off of focused training and nutrition today, I am ready to start my next journey to make my final dive down to 185 lbs. In a months time, I will have taken something that was deemed impossible in my mind for such a long time and have achieved it. It’s just a funny feeling in my mind. It’s funny because it’s such a different taste than what I was left with before.

I think these months make me think about my past a lot. Maybe that’s the part about things dying as well. The past in my mind, the people, the things that have happened, although replayed over quite often…have a lesser and lesser effect on my present as the moments flash by. I still keep the old memories warm, but these memories can also paralyze you from making new ones if you believe that those moments were greater than the ones you could possibly create today. I think I just had a moment with myself right there.

I have been guilty of living in the past because I wanted to go back and change things for much of my life, and I never could change that until I intensely focused on something I could create in the present. I wanted to change things and change myself – and instead of using the moments I had I would dwell on the moments that used to be. I know I am not the only one with this problem. I know there are many others who live in the past or try to live in the future. But you can’t go to those places. All you have is now.

Fear is something that can either drive us or keep us in the same place forever. I’m not fully out of the woods, in fact, I don’t think I will ever be. What I do know is that I will never be returning to a place of not doing something simply because I have a fear that it won’t work out. I will force myself into the uncomfortable because I know it is the best thing for me. Life has yielded its greatest rewards from just doing that and I am looking forward to seeing what else it can bring me.

So here’s to another 30+ days of the journey – to striving for perfection even though we know we will never reach it – and to acting in the face of fear.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project