I have done a lot of overthinking about this post and that overthinking is a very familiar pattern for me.
As I have mentioned many, many times on the blog, I often get caught in thought loops that look like this
I understand that change needs to happen.
I start with good intentions.
I want to do something the ‘right’ way (or, at the very least, I don’t want to do it ‘wrong’)
I overthink and worry about it. (sometimes I seek certainty by doing a ridiculous amount of unstructured research that doesn’t help at all)
I don’t actually take the action because I am so concerned with doing it right that I can’t do anything at all.
I get upset with myself and start the loop again.
And when it comes to the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, for decolonization, for reconciliation practices as a whole, I admit that I have gotten firmly stuck in this loop, over and over again.
I get so caught up in trying to do a good job, in trying to do reconciliation ‘right’, that I end up not taking any useful or sustained actions.
I often have an idea what NOT to do* but I sometimes get so tangled up in avoiding those wrong things that I don’t leave myself room to do anything at all.
I’m tired of this loop and I am getting out of it.
My shirt for National Truth and Reconciliation Day/Orange Shirt Day. The idea of someone asking me why I am wearing orange immediately makes me fear that I will give the ‘wrong’ answer but being willing to make mistakes is all part of the process. Image description: a close-up image of an orange tshirt with white text that reads ‘ask me why I am wearing orange.’
Recently, a friend of mine told me that she sees a lot of people in loops like this – good intentions, overwhelm, guilt, inaction – and she told me the cure:
EDUCATION.
It was both incredibly obvious and a great revelation. **
Obviously, education will help me to understand how to be useful, how to figure out what actions to take, how to do things ‘right enough.’
The revelation was that educating myself is very different than getting caught in a whole loop of researching for certainty.
Thank you, M-L, for helping me to take a step in the right direction.
Now, I want to be clear that I understand that this is not a checklist – I can’t “finish” reconciliation…I can’t even “finish” educating myself.
I understand that reconciliation is about learning new ways of thinking, about new ways of being in relationship with each other, with other species, and with the land.
I understand that there are so very many things that I don’t know, and that I have a lot to unlearn.
I recognize that reconciliation is a very long-term, ongoing project and that it will involve making mistakes and learning from them.
But I refuse to stay in the loop of good intentions with very little action any longer – almost anything I do will be better than that.
And, as recommended, I am starting with seeking education about the truth of Indigenous experiences.
This Living Acknowledgement from First Light is so moving that I wanted to ensure that you had the opportunity to watch it, too. Still image description: two young Indigenous women smile at the camera. They both have dark hair and they have their hair pinned up in braids. The one on the left is wearing a flowered top and the one on the right is wearing a green to and she has glasses.
(This post has been edited to add the two items below. The first one didn’t travel along with the copy and paste from my draft document. The second one was added for clarity after the post went live.)
*For example: I am currently wrestling with thoughts that writing this post this way is centering myself – I know not to do that but I’m not sure if this is an example of that or not. I hope not. I hope this is a loop-breaking way of starting to take the actions I want to take to educate myself properly.
**To clarify a little – It’s not that I thought I knew everything already, it’s that some part of my brain thinks that I don’t know what to do because I haven’t thought about it enough or because I haven’t asked the right questions yet. I forget that the path (and the questions) come from learning – I don’t need to know them before I start. Is this an ADHD thing? A Christine thing? A human thing? It’s probably a combination, right?
Update:
The rally was incredibly moving and incredibly hopeful.
Here are a couple of photos:
The representative from First Light gave a strong speech about how John Cabot didn’t ’discover’ this land and how Turtle Island was well-populated long before Cabot showed up. Image description: A bronze statue of John Cabot wrapped in orange shirts that say ‘ask me why I am wearing orange.’ The statue stands on the steps of the Confederation Bldg (the NL House of Assembly) and there are several people between me and the statue. There are happy children playing on the steps behind the statue – a hopeful contrast to the sombre reason for gathering today. The drummers played a steady beat as a long lineup of people laid tobacco ties at the feet of this statue of Demasduit’s family . Demasduit was a Beothuk woman who was captured by settlers who killed her husband (Nonosabasut) in the process. Her baby died two days after her capture. The speaker reminded us that the statue symbolizes all of the Indigenous families torn apart by colonization. Image description: a bronze statue of a Beothuk woman and her husband holding their baby. There are a lot of small red tobacco ties placed at their feet. Two Indigenous drummers (one in a ribbon skirt) are standing nearby. There are a crowd of people in orange shirts between me and the statues.
The internet is full of advice for how to get more sleep, better sleep, deeper sleep, delicious sleep– you name it, the internet has a to-do list for anything related to sleep.
Don’t even get me started on pillows. Nap dresses have been well-covered by Sam here.
It turns out (unsurprisingly), that modern medicine has been working on better understanding sleep for a long time. I came across this 1925 article (reprinted in JAMA– The Journal of the American Medical Association) that offers us some useful observations about sleep. Here are some of them:
The state of sleep is NOT like being under anesthesia or in a faint (in case you were wondering).
Pulse rate and blood pressure drop during sleep, but do not cause sleep; rather, it’s the other way around.
To wit: “if the drop in pressure were causative, then reclining, being a position favorable for loss of tone, should lead to a more pronounced pressure drop than that of the semierect position, being more conducive to sleep.”
Sleep is sometimes peaceful, but other times we have active dreams and nightmares.
To wit: “the conception of sleep as a period of quiescence and recuperation has thus to be qualified by the contingency of disturbed sleep with active calls on the nervous system, the heart and the blood vessels.”
And here’s their conclusion, which no one can argue with:
In other words, what is true of many factors in life seems also to apply to sleep: most sleeps are good, but some may be far better than others.
Who needs the internet when researchers were hard at work explaining sleep to us a century ago?
Sleep well, dear readers…
Thanks, Sinetta Leuen from Unsplash for the sleeping person. We’ll be very very quiet…
Lots of work, lots of evening and weekend university events. But also lots of lifting weights and bike riding and walking Cheddar the dog.
😃Some September highlights: I really enjoyed riding in the Spinning Wheels Relay (the Pedaling for Parkinsons cross country ride). Sarah and I rode from London to Stratford (with Susan). Then we rode from Waterloo to Guelph, and Oakville to the downtown lakefront in Toronto. Highlights of the highlight? The trumpet fanfare that greeted us in Stratford! And riding the last kilometre into Toronto on Lake Shore Drive with a police escort.
Listen with the sound on!
😟Some September struggles: OMG. Every September I forget what September is like. I love it. I hate it. So much going on, so much energy all around me. I sometimes wish I could bottle that energy on campus and pour it out into the air in March. What kills me every year though is sleep. I have university events on most evenings and early starts to my days. I go from 8 hours sleep a night, to 5 or 6 on weeknights and then 9 or 10 on the weekends. Famine and feast sleep schedules don’t suit me. It’ll be better by mid-October but until then, if you see me yawning, you know why.
Checking in with numbers:
🔢Kilometres ridden: I’m aiming for 2500 kilometers this year, having adjusted my goals to something reasonable. Will I make it? That’s a lot of Zwifting in my future. Stay tuned!
🔢Numbers of workouts: I scaled that back too, aiming for 350 instead of my stretch goal of 400. I’m at 288 now. 94 days left in 2025 so that’s very doable, especially now we’re back to twice-weekly personal training.
Check out my weighted walking lunges with my new knees. I did eight lunges on each side for three sets. I was very proud of this.
Sam’s walking lunges
🔢Books
My favourite fiction book so far this year is Play World by Adam Ross. But I’m also reading lots of science fiction. I made my way through the Bobiverse series and started in on books by John Scalzi. I loved Old Man’s War, his first.
But the nonfiction book I read this year that I strongly recommend to readers of this blog is Serene Khader’s Faux Feminism. Enjoy!
Those who’ve been reading the blog for a while know that cooking is not my thing. And if I didn’t like cooking at the start of the pandemic, I really didn’t like it by the end of the pandemic.
I think I’ve finally recovered from all the pandemic cooking. So much cooking! Yes, Sarah did most of it, but really, there was enough to go around. We even had a night shift of adult kids making chocolate chip cookies and banana bread in the middle of the night.
Mostly when it’s my turn to be the week night cook, I use food that comes in meal kits with “mise en place” instructions. I’m a big fan for reasons of end of day decision fatigue, helping to commit to healthy eating, and avoiding food waste. But I’m actually getting tired of making GoodFood dinners every night. Eating out is an alternative, but it is extremely expensive right now.
So I’m rethinking this cooking thing.
My 25 in 2025 list even included learning to make a new vegan main course.
Next, a friend made a wonderful vegetable dish. She told me the recipe was from this book. I then acquired the book. (I know, who is this person? What happened to Sam?)
All these things came together and I made Potato and Roasted Cauliflower Salad with Olives, Feta and Arugula from the Six Seasons book.
A version of the recipe is here. The recipe has dairy feta, but vegan feta is easy to find. Or you can just leave it out as there’s already a lot going on.
Next, I made a summer salad that a friend was raving about — featuring peaches, grilled corn, and haloumi. Yum! I made this version with pistachios and pickled onions. Yum! Again, there’s vegan haloumi available these days.
As summer turns into fall, I’m thinking about soups and stews. I’m also looking forward to some of our pandemic favourites, like that black pepper tofu dish that all my feminist philosopher friends learned to make, sharing the recipe on social media. I’ve also been craving tofu and cauliflower wings. And simple things like baked potatoes, sweet potato and black bean chili, and apple pies.
Bring on the fall food. I’m ready!
What are your favourite meals to cook in the fall months? Leave recipes and links in the comments below!
It’s not my Peloton instructor Andy’s fault. He has a reasonable expectation that I can count the number of sets I can complete of 6 reps of 4 moves.
I mean. IT IS COUNTING IN MY FIRST LANGUAGE.
It’s as easy as one, two three, right?
Uh. No.
My beloved and I wrapped up week one of our latest strength training program with a 10 minute baseline test. A four minute warmup and six minutes to complete as many sets as possible.
A Strava screenshot showing Andy at full extension of a single arm shoulder press.
Sets were 6 single arm shoulder presses with a medium dumbbell then 6 split squats, repeat on the other side for a total of 24 movements.
The switching of sides challenges my vestibular system. I have a mild impairment and I am improving my balance with exercise. I know it takes a lot of cognitive work for me to move an asymmetrical load.
I suspect that is the point of a single shoulder press, engage your core and glutes to stabilize while pressing upwards. It’s a great move.
I completed the test using my 10 lb dumbbell. I was not at muscle failure at the end of the test. I think I completed six sets? I do not know. Counting reps and staying balanced pushed my set counting aside.
I find split squats, one leg forward, one leg back, very challenging. I do not get the full range of motion to 90 degrees in both legs. I tend to fall more into a lunge.
Screenshot of an instructor demonstrating a split squat. Note the two 90 degree leg bends
I get nervous about dropping past the point of positive control and hitting my back knee on the floor.
I’m using chairs and other assistance to explore going deeper outside of workouts.
Suffice to say, I was challenged in some ways for the test while also feeling validated that I’m stronger and more competent with these two moves. The end of the program test I won’t have a numerical baseline but I’ll use this post as my qualitative baseline.
I hope you are getting the results you want from your workouts!
You “lock in” your new good habits before the new year. Starting three months before January 1, the idea is that you’ll have the strength, resilience and routine to start the new year right by the time January comes around.
What are the habits?
9 hours sleep a night
3 litres of water a day
No sugar
No fast food
No smoking
No alcohol
Daily cold showers
Workouts 3-5 times a week
No screens one hour before bed
10k steps a day
My thoughts:
That’s a lot of NOs.
I might add one, NO COLD SHOWERS. For me, anyway. You do you.
What’s wrong with the usual 8 hours sleep a night and 2 litres of water a day?
Seriously, it feels very restrictive and unsustainable to me.
Is there anything about it I like? I’ve always liked focusing on health and fitness in the fall. As an academic September feels more “new year” to me than January. And I’ve never liked thinking of December as binge month and January as the Big Change.
But for more thoughts about making sustainable changes, read the article from The Independent, linked above.
Happy Friday?
How do you feel about challenges like this one? Anything in it that works for you?
I volunteered this week at The Grand Slam of Curling event, The AMJ Masters, which features 16 top men’s teams and 16 top women’s teams. Many are from North America, but other countries like Korea, Japan, and Switzerland are also representing.
Sign that says Welcome to the Grand Slam of Curlingt (GSOC)
There’s a lot I like about this curling event. The teams aren’t mixed gender, but the draws schedule them to play at the same time. That means you can watch four men’s and four women’s teams competing side by side on the same ice. I’m still newish to curling, so this was an exciting sports-watching experience for me!
Curlers on the ice sliding to stretch and warm up.
Team members wear matching kits, and their stretchy deliveries and hard sweeping show a shared level of fitness for fast-paced, eight-end games. But body sizes vary. Some athletes wear glasses (rather than contacts), while others sport baseball caps. There’s some small room to bring one’s style, and self, to the ice.
Men’s and women’s teams playing at the same time on different sheets
Near the end of the tournament there is a GSOC Pride Night, with a discounted tickets, beverage specials, and a post-game Pride event featuring live drag performances. Apparently there is a karaoke night too! It is great to see the sport evolving with the community it has always been about.
Sign says Karaoke on Saturday. GSOK Grand Slam of Karaoke
GSOC is still a private, for-profit organization with no standalone policy on gender identity and expression (that I could find), unlike the non-profit, development-focused Curling Canada. Shared ice time and inclusive events show curling’s welcoming spirit. Maybe the GSOC will follow Curling Canada’s lead by eventually offering a similar policy.
Still, it’s a privilege to volunteer for this event, and not only because I get to see up close some fantastic curling by teams from around the world. I hope organizations like GSOC keep making curling fun and celebratory of the many ways curling athletes are different and differently awesome.
In the arena, with four sheets and an audience
Plus, there’s even delicious snacks for volunteers. Thanks Denise!
Back in 2022, I mused about using my power for good by becoming a lifeguard and giving back to the sport I love so much.
Since I started working almost a year ago, I have taken great pleasure in teaching recent immigrants who are five times more likely than people born in Canada to be non-swimmers. I have also had the joy of lifeguarding for a day at the pool for women who are normally excluded from swimming because beaches and pools are mixed gender.
This week was extra special. In the summer, a teen drowned at one of the city’s beaches. Teachers at their high school responded by getting a Jumpstart grant so that girls who had never learned to swim could take female-only lessons. They even bought a big bin full of modest swimwear and sports hijabs to be used by anyone who wanted them.
We blocked all the windows for privacy and I had the pleasure of teaching 20 teen girls to put their heads under water, jump in (a couple even tried it in the deep end), float, glide, and try some basic strokes.
The girls were great – smiling, overcoming their fears and helping each other. The teachers were wonderful too. I really appreciated that both got into the water and worked with students so that a few were able to swim most of the width of the pool by the end of class.
Not “my” girls. These young women wearing modest swimsuits and floating peacefully in a bright blue swimming pool are from a Nike modest swimwear ad campaign found on models.com. The photographer is Paola Kudaki.
It was the perfect way to hit 225 on my 225 workouts in 2025 goal.
Sadly, this was only a substitute assignment for me because the regular teacher was sick. I have put my name in to be called first if she needs to be away again, and offered to teach any future sessions that might be offered.
Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage is a group I would like to join. Sadly, the group works in Cape Cod, so I can’t actually join, but how awesome is their mission statement from their website?
In 2017, Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage, OLAUG, was formed. We have been cleaning up ponds on Cape Cod from Falmouth to Chatham ever since. Gathering small teams of swimmers, ages 65 to 85, we sweep along the shallows, diving down to pick up beer cans, golf balls, fishing lures, waterlogged dog toys, hats, jackets, shoes, and occasionally a tire, cell phone or box of spent fireworks.
Whatever we heave up from the bottom, we hand to the Garbage Collector who paddles a canoe or kayak. Our affection and respect for the fish, turtles, and plants that live in the ponds are what motivates us. Well, that and cookies.
Five women stand in thigh deep water holding a toilet they have pulled out of the water. They all have huge smiles and are obviously very pleased with their “catch”. Photo is from the OLAUG Facebook page.
I heard a couple of the members interviewed a few weeks ago and was impressed with the level of fitness required.
Swimmers, without fins, need to be:
able to swim ½ mile freestyle in 30 minutes or less
able to swim a mile
comfortable spending 1.5 hours in the water, with a lot of treading water
comfortable and proficient swimming with mask and snorkel
comfortable diving down 6-9 feet to retrieve trash.
Kayakers need to be able to:
maneuver easily without knocking into swimmers
keep your kayak steady while receiving sometimes heavy trash on one side from a swimmer
keep your kayak steady in windy conditions
keep track of swimmers and tell them if they are getting too far away
paddle while a tired or injured swimmer hangs onto the bow
right themself or get safely to shore should they capsize.
There are tryouts to ensure everyone can meet the standard.
I sometimes pick up underwater trash when I’m swimming, and I follow various organizations who clean up ocean plastics, or rescue animals snared in fishing gear or other materials, so I have an extra appreciation for the work these women are doing.
The organization is small but starting to grow in new locations. If someone were to open a chapter in the Ottawa area, I would love to join.
A line of women, most wearing red shirts, stands on a sandy beach in front of a collection of trash that probably came from the water in the background.
