In case you’re curious, here’s what I typically do when I’m not going into the clinic for physiotherapy.
On most days I divide this into a morning set and an afternoon set with another round just of flexion and extension in the evening. When I’m going into the clinic, I let that count as my afternoon set.
After a round of physio exercises, there’s then elevation and icing but that’s getting less urgent now which is good since I’m returning to work next week. Luckily there’s a freezer at my workplace for ice and a ton of room for physio in my office.
In preparation for returning to work, I’m moving all of my physio appointments to the evening. I’m very excited about biking there. It’s about 5 km from my office and then another 7 km home, so a perfectly reasonable summer evening bike ride.
I do other stuff too–TRX squats and some kettlebell swings. At the clinic, I also do some weighted sled pushes and pulls, I use the leg press machine, and then there’s my least favorite, monster walks. My favorite is riding my bike on the trainer which also helps a lot. But the eleven above are the everyday, mainstay of my daily rehab workout.
Yes, it’s finally arrived. We’ve all been waiting impatiently– hankering to put up our meditation house decorations, buy enlightenment-directed presents, draw names at the office for the annual Secret Bodhisattva event, you name it. Well, knock yourself out (or rather, sit yourself down on your zafu cushion), because it’s happening today: that’s right, it’s World Meditation Day 2023!
There’s apparently a dedicated World Meditation Day slide template. Hit me up if you want a copy.
Lest you think this is just a niche event, I saw that LinkedIn is planning its own workplace meditation activities. Here are some of their graphics, as proof.
People meditating in workplace casual attire, against that blue LinkedIn background.
You may be having trouble narrowing down what to do in honor of this very auspicious day. Don’t worry– I’ve put together a handy list of things that I might do; feel free to follow my lead, or create your own list (which I’d love to hear about in the comments, if writing comments ends up on your list…)
Number one: Nothing. I mean, spend some time doing nothing. Sit or stand or walk or lie down and just be for a bit. Let things get a little quieter. No multitasking for now. Oh, and either close your eyes or not; if not, maybe look softly slightly ahead of you and down a little bit so your head is comfortable.
Number two: Notice. What’s happening as I’m standing, sitting, walking, lying down or whatever? Are there sounds? Smells? Sensations? Feelings? Thoughts? All of the above? None of the above? Okay.
Number three: Breathe. In. Out. If you want to notice that, do so. You’ll likely get distracted (as you are one of the sentient humans), and then you’ll notice you’re distracted, so you’ll go back to noticing your breathing. Or the sensations, or sounds. Or whatever.
Number four: Maybe set a timer before starting (this should’ve been number zero– sorry about that) if you feel uncomfortable with something open-ended, if you’re busy, if you are a timer fan (I’m one of them– I almost never meditate without one, which is… totally fine. Up to you), or whatever. If want a timer specific to meditation, there are a zillion of them. Insight Timer is free and one of the many you might like.
Number five: Stop. You’ve probably got other things to do today (World Meditation Day block party or BBQ?). More likely those things include laundry, work, play, socializing, or dealing with any number of the things in our rich and complicated lives. So, go on and do those things now.
Number six: Consider starting over again at number one tomorrow. It won’t be World Meditation Day 2023. But, it will be a day in which the world might benefit from some meditation. Just a thought.
Hey readers– what did you end up doing on World Meditation Day? Lemme know.
Image shows a bag of garbage with two garbage hooks. Not pictured is your intrepid blogger.
A few weeks my husband asked me if I would like garbage picker upper. He had bought one two years ago when he began walking to strengthen his leg after healing from a break. I thought it was a great idea and agreed. A week later it appeared and off we went.
I had written about plogging back in 2018 when a pandemic was something only epidemiologists and public health educators fretted about. Plogging technically means picking up garbage while jogging, but I’m not a fast runner at the best of times and my knees are creakier. These days I’m into plalking, or walking while garbage picking.
It’s an interesting exercise and also beneficial to the environment. In a scant 30 minutes, we filled a bag. We probably could have added more but I was just getting the hang of the plogger-stick as I now call it.
Plogging is fun exercise: you bend; you carry weight; you stretch. You also practice balance as you walk up and down on uneven ground. Different leg and arm muscles get a work out, You are out in the fresh air and can feel the wind on your face and in your hair.
As the weather gets nicer, we will walk further afield. If you are looking for something that offers physical activity with environmental stewardship, plogging may be the thing for you. As for me, I’m going to find a widget that can help me keep track of how many bags of waste we collect as I aim to increase my daily steps.
Have a safe and happy long weekend! Remember, if you are out in a boat, wear a life jacket (aka PFD). If you choose to drink alcohol or consume edibles, keep your car/boat/ATV keys in your pockets and park yourself in a lawn chair.
As spring turns the corner around to summer, and my work-from-home job is feeling more normal, I am turning my own thoughts away from my professional goals and back to my goals related to my health.
In the lead-up to starting my new job in March, I had spent an intensive year looking for a job I felt really good about. For quite some time now, my professional goals have taken priority for me. I’m thrilled about my return to a career in insurance claims, but I am also needing to find balance. Work is intense and I am sometimes finding it hard to turn off my brain. Much to my consternation, I am having some mild low back pain, a totally new thing to me.
So this week I snuck away from my desk for an 8:30am aquafit class offered by in a public City pool. I went because I was feeling achy and stressed and wasn’t really feeling focused.
Much to my surprise, I had a GREAT time even though I hadn’t been in the water in quite a few weeks. Even more joyous for me, my brain was completely cleared. What a cool thing that was. I had a productive, enjoyable work day. Wahoo!
I like aquafit and find deep-water classes the perfect amount of fun versus challenging. When I started attending aquafit intermittently, almost 20 years ago, I was usually the youngest person in the pool. Often, I still am. I’ve often written here about my struggles with exercise here – how fun to get to say something that feels purely positive.
My “home” pool – an older and modest pool that I love!
I’m writing this at the end of the week and my back got achy again. Clearly I need to set myself a schedule for self care – that is not something I’m good at. In fact, I’m writing this as a way to keep myself accountable, and to also create some more positive brain waves.
I’d love recommendations for exercise planning if you have any. I am thinking I need a balance of aquafit, weekly yoga and meditation. My gosh, when I write that, honestly, I’m a bit dazzled. Who even am I? Not the kid who used to literally quiver walking into the school gym for PE class.
More than a few friends have watched me go through knee replacement surgery and recovery with the thought that they want to avoid this in their life.
I get that.
If you’re at the stage I was at that I couldn’t walk around a grocery store, and you’ve tried years and years of shots and physio and braces, then knee surgery is necessary. Once you’re at that point, I don’t think avoiding knee surgery is possible.
I also don’t think it’s worth putting off until 70 when at 70 you’ll be doing it with years and years of inactivity behind you.
But how to avoid getting there in the first place?
Now, to be clear, I’m a PhD but I’m not a medical doctor. Everything you’re reading here is just based on my own reading and experience. YMMV and it’s always good to do your own research.
The causes of knee osteoarthritis are many. And they’re mostly things you can’t control. The list includes age, sex (more common in women than men), weight, prior injury, and genetics.
I sometimes wonder if there was a sport I shouldn’t have done because of knee injuries. Mostly I worry about soccer. But it’s unclear that I could have avoided this.
The single biggest thing you can do to help is strengthening the muscles that support the knee. I’ve been advising friends with minor knee aches and pains to take those pains seriously. You can read through by post blog posts to see that’s how things began with me. See a physiotherapist now and start a preventative routine. Physiotherapists are wonderful people and I think they’d love seeing patients interested in preventing future damage to their joints.
The good thing is that if you do end up losing the knee lottery and needing surgery, all of the knee strengthening is excellent prehab. There’s no downside to strong legs!
On one hand, we can celebrate new gains for representation and inclusion: Martha Stewart has cut through the spandex ceiling, making it possible for “older women” to be cover photo-worthy by Sports Illustrated (SI), a magazine whose annual swimsuit issue authoritatively confers the status of beautiful to its models. As an octogenarian swimsuit model, Martha Stewart brings diverse body image to popular media (and to the news media that reports on popular media).
As well, this development signals a growing acceptance of older women’s sexuality. Martha Stewart has left the kitchen and entered the swimming pool. According to a CBC analysis article, Martha Stewart said on Today that she increased her exercise regime and cut out carbs (but didn’t starve herself) to show that “You can look great at pretty much any age if you put your mind to it.” If Martha Stewart can put her mind (and enormous wealth) towards looking sexually alluring at 81, isn’t that permission for us all?
On the other hand, scholar (and aspiring clairvoyant?) @tracyisaacs might have foreseen Martha Stewart’s gracing of the cover of SI’s Swimsuit issue when she wrote about what she describes as inclusive objectificationhere at FIFI and in The Conversation. Tracy acknowledges that commercializing the sexual attractiveness of a wider spectrum of women’s bodies seems, on the surface, to be a good thing (or at least not harmful one). However, mainstream media, embodied by the swimsuit issue (pun intended),
“continues to promote sexual attractiveness as women’s main currency. […] (It’s) it’s not clear how the swimsuit issue, the very essence of which is to represent a particular type of sexualized bodies, could morph into something that celebrates the body in a different way.”
From this perspective, it may be said that Martha Stewart has escaped one form of traditional female currency (homemaker) to another (swimsuit cover model). SI has shown us that Martha Stewart is worthy of sex appeal, but nothing has fundamentally changed the “relentless message about what makes women worthy,” as Tracy notes.
The CBC analysis article quotes Anna Murphy, who finds it refreshing that Martha Stewart refuses to “age out of the public eye.” (This is a return to modeling for Martha Stewart). But the SI issue heavily suggests that, in order to stay in the public eye, Martha Stewart must, in her own words, continue to “aspire to look great.”
Let’s also note that Martha Stewart doesn’t look great on her own. The are four covers of the same magazine issue —featuring Megan Fox, Brooks Nader, and Kim Petras, singer and transgender model (perhaps the most interesting and progressive choice). So conventional sexy and controversial sexy can remain in the public eye together.
Author of the CBC article, Jenna Benchetrit, concludes her analysis with an unanswered question initially asked by Tracy: “It’s breaking barriers, yes. But are these the barriers we want to break?” We at FIFI have many diverse voices, so I speak for myself when I (and maybe some of we) say no. Or at least, certainly not only.
Another Jenna, Jenna Peterson, happens to answer Jenna B’s question in a humorously memed social media post. Jenna P doesn’t want to continue to “aspire to look great” as she ages. Jenna P sees “aging out” of sexy as precisely what she wants to accomplish.
“I hate this whole “women can be sexy at fifty!” narrative. At what age will society stop demanding I try to be hot and just let me turn into an old swamp witch, as nature intended.”
As a cis-woman who is just over half Martha Stewart’s age, I’m inclined to agree with Jenna P. Aside from discourse of what is “natural” for women (for instance, it doesn’t matter much to me whether or not Martha Stewart has had body modifications), women can transgress their worthiness via sexual objectification…by letting themselves just get (and look) old.
Perhaps Sports Illustrated might have photographed an 81 year-old, swim-suited Martha Stewart emerging from a witchy swamp? Well, maybe next year.
Readers, what perspective do you take on this issue?
I shared it with the blog team to see if anyone had anything more profound to add. Someone suggested that you might also choose to wear yoga pants on your way to divorce court after leaving this guy and any other guys who hold this opinion.
Probably the best internet response came from Twitter user @shesbonky. She honed in on the double standard angle of it all.
In honor of stupid Christians pretending that women's leggings are too revealing, each day I will be posting a photo of a man, exercising in almost nothing, in public spaces.
“In honor of stupid Christians pretending that women’s leggings are too revealing, each day I will be posting a photo of a man, exercising in almost nothing, in public spaces,” @shesbonky tweeted and shared a photo of a man jogging topless.
It’s a classic, isn’t it? Alice Cooper, singing “School’s Out”,
One of the pleasures of the end of my semester is looking over the vast number of books I have (hello, pandemic online shopping!) that I haven’t read yet, and teeing up those for close-to-immediate consumption. You might like some of them, and you might also have recommendations for us, so please feel free to post any suggestions in the comments.
A book I just got in the mail is called Fat Girls Hiking, by Summer Michaud-Skog. It’s got tips and advice and stories and pictures. As a person who doesn’t love hiking but loves nature, I thought it might be useful. Will report back.
How the Other Half Eats: the untold story of food and inequality in America, by Priya Fielding-Singh, came out in 2021, when many of us were a bit preoccupied with other matters. But now is a good time for me to turn to this book. I’m teaching a freshman seminar in Philosophy of Food, and getting myself caught up on recent research is important. I was catching up on podcasts the other week and heard Fielding-Singh on the podcast Code Switch talking about the book. Definitely worth checking out.
Even though this is an academic book, Why Wellness Sells: natural health in a pharmaceutical culture, by Colleen Derkatch, is another book I’m looking forward to reading and report on to all you FIFI readers. Here are some excerpts from the description of the book:
Public interest in wellness is driven by two opposing philosophies of health that cycle into and amplify each other: restoration, where people use natural health products to restore themselves to prior states of wellness; and enhancement, where people strive for maximum wellness by optimizing their body’s systems and functions.
Oh yes. Please go on…
The concept of wellness entrenches an individualist model of health as a personal responsibility, when collectivist approaches would more readily serve the health and well-being of whole populations.
My thoughts exactly! I love it when I agree with a book before even reading it… 🙂 Seriously, though, the so-called wellness culture is pervasive and often suspect. I’m looking forward to reading what Derkatch has to say.
Climate change is most definitely a Feminist Issue. The book All We Can Save: truth, courage and solutions for the climate crisis is an anthology of hopeful essays, stories and poems, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson. It also came out n 2021, and I bought it then. Now seems like high time to crack it open and see what it has to say. I can use both some good news and also nudges to become more active in helping take care of/save the planet.
These are now at the top of the (very big) pile of books I want to read. Yes, there’s fun fiction in there, too. I just finished Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, which was darkly comic and a satisfying read. I’m just starting The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, is on my bedside table and next up.
Dear Readers, what are you reading this summer? Audio/kindle/paperback/first edition/graphic novel/something new? I’d love to hear what you’re starting, what you’re finishing, what you liked, and what you didn’t.
My right knee is healing well. I can do a lot with it now.
For example, I can walk upstairs now the normal way. I don’t need to lead with the good knee. Both knees are good enough for that task.
Also, and this is more exciting, five weeks past total knee replacement, I can pedal forwards on the bike. Yay! I’m doing about five minutes of forward pedaling at a time. I haven’t turned Zwift on yet as I’m not keen to see my speed, power, or cadence but being able to pedal forwards is exciting enough.
I’m also impressed that my knees match. Check out those surgical scars. A friend reminded me to use sunscreen on them.
I spent some time looking at tattoos for knees but then decided I don’t want to cover these up. Also, if I need revision surgery in there future I’d hate to mess them up.
My much more functional knees make me smile. And I’m not bothered by the scars. I’ve been wearing shorts and not feeling at all self conscious about them. I do notice now that lots of other people have them and I don’t think I noticed at all before.
Do you have visible surgical scars? How do you feel about them?
Please note: Despite my whimsical title, this post is about grief. Proceed with caution.
A friend of mine jokingly refers to smart watches as ‘wrist spies.’ Since she says it without malice or judgement, I find it hilarious and I’ve started using the term on a regular basis.
As spies go, though, it has been failing this past week. It might end up having to come in from the cold.
On Sunday, I received a notification that my ‘Mindfulness’ minutes are down this week and I immediately said, aloud, “Shows what you know, Wrist Spy!”
(By the way, if me talking to an inanimate object makes you concerned for my state of mind, rest easy. I do it all the time and, so far, my wrist spy is the only object that talks back to me. And that only happens when I say her name…or, let’s be honest here, anything that sounds like her name.)
Seriously though, I thought it was pretty funny that my wrist spy was calling my attention to my mindfulness because this past week has been one of the most mindful times of my life.
As you know from last week’s post, my Dad passed away on May 6th.
I’ve spent the last week thinking about him, about his life, about our lives, and about what the world looks like without my Dad in it.
I had lots to do but I was never trying to keep busy to avoid thinking. Yet, I didn’t end up ruminating either. I just sat (or stood, or walked) with whatever came up.
I’m not trying to cast myself as a perfect model of emotional maturity and mindfulness here, this was more by fluke than by design.
And, it helped that the tasks I took on – writing the obituary, writing and delivering the eulogy – not only gave me some good structures for my thinking, they were also the types of practices I do to help me process big emotions.
I didn’t consciously choose those tasks to serve that purpose but my subconscious was clearly on the case this time.
So, instead of spending my time thinking about the fact that my Dad is gone, I could spend my time thinking about how he lived and who he was, and how his spirit lives on in his family and friends.
All of that thinking felt very mindful, very in-the-moment to me.
And when I started to cry, I just let myself cry until the worst of the feeling had passed.
When I felt overwhelmed, I breathed through it. Sometimes I did that on my own, sometimes because my husband said, “You’re breathing fast, try to slow it down.”
And, I found myself noticing everything so sharply and clearly.
I saw crocuses on a lawn when I was out for a walk with the dog. I looked at them closely – the petals, the colours, the leaves – and I had a flash thought that my Dad won’t ever see flowers like that again. He wasn’t big into flowers or anything but the thought still welled up. Instead of getting carried off into grief about the things he would miss, I, luckily, was able to choose to notice them for him. I paid close attention to the colours, the contrasts, the petals and leaves, and how they stood out against the dull grass.
Image Description: a cluster of crocuses ( a few yellow and a few each of three shades of purple) surrounded by winter-worn grass.
And I drank my (many, many) cups of tea slowly, letting the mug warm my hands and letting the scent and taste wash over me.
I turned my face to the sun when it came out, feeling warmed and hopeful and bright, despite the circumstances.
I talked with so many people who knew Dad and I paid attention to the details they shared with me and leaned into the connection to him.
And, I did a hundred other small things that felt mindful and kept me present.
On Friday, as I was waiting before the memorial service began, I played some songs from a playlist that I created – Songs that make me think of Pete *- and I sat and breathed slowly and felt like things would be ok.
Ever since listening so carefully on Friday, a few lines from Itchycoo Park by Small Faces have been floating up over and over in my brain, reminding me of the good things in the world even during this challenging time.
(What did you feel there?) well, I cried (But why the tears there?) tell you why It’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful It’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful
Obviously, I’m having a very different kind experience than the main character in the song m. His ability to notice the beauty around him hinged on the substances he took. I am looking for and feeling the beauty around me because the intensity of my emotions is making everything very vivid right now.
While it isn’t always easy, this vivid sense of awareness means I have been very “present” from moment to moment for the past week or so.
I’m feeling all the difficult feelings, I am acutely aware of my experiences, and I am sharply attuned to the beautiful things around me like crocuses and hot cups of tea and my friends rallying to support me.
And all of that adds up to mindfulness even if it isn’t happening in a way that a wrist spy can track.
My watch may be spying on me but it doesn’t know everything.
*Please note, some of these songs are from my Dad’s youth and hence some of the lyrics are sketchy at best. Please don’t judge my Dad for the songs he liked then and please don’t assume that he held every value (or lack thereof) expressed in every song. I included them in my playlist because they make me think of Dad singing them.
