How to Build a Tower With No Foundation

I’m learning the importance of intentional habits. Along the way of my wellness journey, I’ve also recognized the importance of writing things down. Bear with me as I practice doing this for a first time in a new way because this time, I’m saying it publicly through blog.

I was inspired to journal again semi-regularly, meaning about 2–3x a week, after I typed out some of my values in the Notes app on my iPhone.

When I first wrote it, it felt natural to call them foundations. I was reflecting on the foundations of my well-being as an attempt to tend to it, so my road toward becoming a business would be more evenly paved.

Previously, I felt this sort of unsettling, uneven anxiety. Like, I was stacking blocks atop a haphazard tower. Feeling proud of the height, yes, but dreading having to delicately calculate the place of the next block — feeling like the most recent ascent in achievement already wasn’t enough. After a while, the vision which I was building eluded me more and more, and I felt at any moment a sudden sharp gust of wind could gut me if it wanted. And then it would be over. All over the ground in pieces.

This is the importance of knowing your foundational values: they keep you aligned.

Instead of waiting for the wind to have its way with me and my tower, I decided to acknowledge the value of my wellness foundations, so that I could realign myself — rein in the malalignments before things twisted and toppled until unrecognizable.

I can tell you. Though these values never changed for me and were always there buried in the back of my mind, my actions weren’t honoring these foundations as wholly as they could have. How do you build a tower with holes in its foundation on blueprint, yet expect to see the full vision? That is why I write things down and revisit them.

How do you build a tower with holes in its foundation on blueprint, yet expect to see the full vision?

I needed foundational habits that I could base myself off of. That would appear naturally in my vision for this tower. I scaled down all the way to the very basics: daily habits. Nothing grand, but something of influence.

I set my habits up in a way that directly reflects the shape of alignment I want to inhabit. Holistically well-rounded yet accessible, doable. These habits involve all [six] aspects of well-being to some degree: emotional, financial, mental, physical, social, spiritual. What’s more, is they provide me opportunity to actively align my actions with my foundations. Do I hit them all everyday? Not as often as I’d like, but that’s something I’m habitually working toward.

I’ve already written it down, and so, it is. It already exists.