I was a late bloomer; at 12 years old all the other boys had started puberty, but not me.
So I quit the hockey. It was no fun playing contact against kids who outweighed me by half my body weight.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and I’m no longer the smallest around, however, many years of training and practice were gone, and I was restarting from zero.
That first year was bad, I had so much to relearn, it was a bit of a misery, but I was having fun, and I never gave up.
One young man I knew had played some fairly serious hockey, and he took it upon himself to tutor the sad old guy. One time he was shouting at me to keep two hands on my stick, and on the bench threatened to tape my glove to my stick.
So I spent the rest of the game, hell, the rest of the season making, “two hands on the stick, stick on the ice,” my mantra. A small thing, but repeated twice weekly for an year developed the proper habits necessary to take a pass and make a play.
I was reminded of this today when I woke up.
Good sleep being fundamental to living well, I’ve been trying to develop proper sleep habits. One of the biggest problems is “Sunday morning catch up.” You know, staying in bed and getting an extra hour or two of sleep on Sunday.
Doing this sets you up for a late bed time and a short Sunday night’s sleep. So you start the week tired, and needing to catch up.
And you never develop a proper sleep schedule.
So this morning I made myself get up with my alarm, because success lies in the small disciplines.
