Discipline - A Sibling to Integrity

But is discipline the same as having good habits?

Aloha! Welcome. How lovely to have new reader subscribers again this week. Mahalo for joining me here, and mahalo as always to my loyal readers who have hung in here for weeks or months or years. I am a mere five weeks out from my Grand Canyon adventure with Freeflow Institute…rivers, poetry and Discipline are very much on my mind.

In exploring the concept of personal integrity last week, I concluded that a component of having personal integrity is having a kind of discipline. A consistency that others come to count on. A disciplined approach even to compromise, allowing for flexibility that furthers the ultimate outcome and remains in keeping with values to which one is committed. A discipline that means you do the right thing, or the consistent thing, whether or not anyone is watching - whether or not the story or reel will be posted.

I describe myself as a disciplined person and guess that others would describe me that way as well. What is the grounding for that assessment? Well for example, I write here weekly, I write weekly real estate blog posts for the Hawaiʻi Life website, I have daily practices like gratitude and yoga about which my readers have read. Even when I fall short of those standards, I have strategies for fulfilling them. These commitments and practices seem to constitute evidence of disciplined approach to life.

But I wonder. Do I have discipline or have I just fallen into habits and activities that have become part of who I am, things I do automatically that others consider “good” things to do regularly? Are ingrained habits the same as discipline? Do I judge habits begun out of discipline as better, as morally superior to accidentally acquired good habits?

Does any of this matter? Am I back into the same self-judging philosophical territory as wondering whether naming a sometimes chaotic or contradictory life as “poetic” actually means I am just making excuses for living out of integrity?

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Last September when I got accepted into the cohort for Freeflow Instituteʻs Grand Canyon 2026 trip¹, I assured them (and myself) that I would be in shape to hike out on the Bright Angel Trail on April 15th. In a semi-panic, I asked ChatGPT to suggest a training schedule to build up from my level of weekly activity at the time. A level of weekly activity that, to be honest, had diminished over the years as my once hyperactive Weimaraner aged and our runs became walks became strolls.

Armed with a program, each week I walked longer, faster, over more hilly terrain. I could feel my cardiovascular fitness returning. But Coach ChatGPT - and the monthly emails from the outfitter who will take us down the Colorado River and up the trail at the end - also suggested strength training in a gym.

It took a few months (during which I made the excuse that I was traveling too much for consistency) - but in December I finally walked through the door of Five Mountain Fitness and signed up. Coach CGPT did not have a clue what specific exercises would prepare me - so neither did I. Enter Coach Bill. He designed three workouts programmed into a cool app for my phone, and carefully introduced me to every piece of equipment and the proper form for its use. The goal is to get me up the trail in good enough condition to host - and enjoy! - my own destination birthday party a few days later.

Within a few weeks of beginning the new workout program, “Wellbeing” had emerged as my word of the year. Every time I left the gym, my body was humming with Wellbeing, my mind clear and calm. I found myself excited about the training regimen, strength training and hiking both. I looked forward to my gym time. I mentioned this to one of my oldest dearest friends in a post-holiday catch up call. She chuckled. “You have always loved going to the gym,” she reminded me.

I was shocked. It was true! Any friend or colleague who knew me in my 20s and 30s would have said the same.

How could I have arrived at a point where I was so far out of the habit of working out in a gym that it was no longer part of my identity? Was that a lapse of discipline? Had giving up the structure of corporate life resulted in giving up the structure of fitness? Was there a connection between having a first husband who described himself as a “professional amateur athlete” and a second husband who, despite sharing the same naturally athletic build and talents, had a typically European disdain for gyms and exercise for exercise sake?

Not that knowing the answers to these questions will have any effect whatsoever on my adhering to the program. The mixture of excitement, nervousness, achievement drive to better my metrics as measured by that damn Garmin watch, and yes, sheer physical, endorphin-enhanced enjoyment at feeling my body respond to training, is a heady one. I crave working out.

Whatʻs discipline got to do with endorphins? Whatʻs love but a second hand emotion?

We have a bunch more territory to cover together. See you back here next week.

1. I keep linking to this for my new readers who might not know why I am on this track about poetry and wilderness and preparation. There is definitely a kind of circle back to where I began this Substack, with my preparing to leave for Tibet in 1992. If you were not with me as a reader in 2022, you might want to read What Happened Before What Happened Happened.