You are what you do

Before I start writing, before I stare at the blinking cursor on my computer, before I make an outline, before I have any idea of what to say, before I can even sense the shape of anything to write about, I go for a walk.

““By moving yourself, you move your mind.” ”
— Silence in the Age of Noise, Erling Kagge 2016
 

The sun is shining from its low position on its winter path in the southern sky. It is unusual for the wind to be blowing from the East, but this morning it is. The wind is on my face as Zivon, my Chocolate Lab, and I head out on a hike to the aspen grove at the head of a patch of land too steep and rough to be farmed, about two miles out our back door.

We walked in the rough, matted grass next to where last season's winter wheat had been tilled up. The field has been tilled using a moldboard plow, which overturns the soil, burying weed seeds and harvest residue under the soil's top. The surface is soft and clumpy, making it hard to walk in. The matted grasses on the edge of the field are only a little easier to walk in. Here we are only talking about me. Zivon roamed everywhere, in the tilled field, in the grasses, down by the creek, in amongst the Hawthorne trees lining the stream, all over the place without any preference other than which area has the freshest and most enticing scents.

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The message of neuron-plasticity is that we become what we repeatedly do, think, read, react to, how we treat others, and what we allow ourselves to be exposed to. You are making yourself based on what you are doing with your attention and the habits you are ramifying. You are quite literally sculpting your neural circuitry.