Khalee and I have been working on a walking challenge – The Great Sniffari 2026 – and I chose for us to walk 21km over the first 10 days of May.
Often when I try to take photo of Khalee, she steps out of the way. This time she kind of photobombed my photo of this fallen tree with the roots exposed and a ‘witch broom’ tangle of branches on it. Image description: a photo of Khalee, my medium-sized dog with short, light-brown hair on most of her body and white paws, tail, and face, wearing a jaunty green bandana with cartoon bugs on it. She is looking to the right in the photo and her neck is foreshortened because of the angle so she looks a little squished. Behind her is a fallen tree with the roots exposed.
The challenge seemed like it would be fairly easy at the outset – a small extra effort on top of our usual walks – but things went a bit awry and I realized last Thursday that I was going to have to do a bit of a push to finish on time.
So on Thursday we walked 2.78km, on Friday we did 2.81, Saturday was 3km which technically brought us to the end of our challenge.* (In fact, we only needed .29km on Saturday to finish.)
I say technically because I didn’t realize the settings in the app wouldn’t carry over from my other, year-long, challenge and the Sniffari was pulling Apple Health step data.
I didn’t actually want to include steps from things like walking around the house or the grocery store but because they automatically uploaded at the end of each day, I didn’t realize they were being rolled into my total and I was surprised to find out that I was finished.
Once I figured out why I had finished a day early, I calculated my actual distances and then added extra amounts to my daily walks for the next few days to match the way I wanted things to play out.
No matter the details of the challenge, on Saturday I realized something important.
These longer walks were making me feel great.
I mean, I generally enjoy going for a walk – even when I have to drag myself out for them – but this was a different kind of enjoyment.
I was starting to feel those kind of intangible benefits I get when I exercise regularly – a looser feeling in my hips, a certain ease of movement, an overall feeling of wellbeing – after only 3 days of extra effort.
That seemed kind of quick but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in its proverbial mouth here. Instead, I decided to keep building momentum.
So, on Sunday, we walked 4.42km and, on Monday, we walked 4.08km, and it felt purposeful, straightforward, and kind of tiring – but in a good way.
And, on top of that, all of this extra movement seems to have flipped a mental switch for me and I have found myself doing a bit more yoga, a few more strength training exercises, taking a few extra trips up the stairs, and adding mobility exercises while I am doing things around the house.
So, it seems that, like the title says, moving more makes me want to move more.
And I like it!
Of course, I know that this has happened to me before – I’ve gotten into an exercise routine, started to feel the effects, been enjoying myself, and then something has gone sideways and I lost momentum or had to change gears.
So, I have told myself to keep an eye out for when that happens and in the meantime I am developing some backup plans.
I’ll let you know how it all goes, obviously. 🙂
a photo of Khalee, my medium-sized dog with short, light-brown hair on most of her body and white paws, tail, and face, standing next to a river on a bright, sunny day. She is sort of side on and she’s facing the left side of the photo. She has a harness and leash on. She’s standing on dried grass and mud, the river next to her is filled with brownish red rocks and there are trees and more dried grass and mud on the other side of the river.
A few weeks ago, I shared my excitement about a longer run I’d done with a close friend, a runner and occasional running companion. Some context: as those of you who read my posts know, I’ve set myself the challenge of doing a 21k run once a month this year. This is a stretch, given I never ran that distance once last year and had foot surgery. It’s a challenge I think can complete. And each time I’ve set out so far this year, I’ve felt a frisson of fear. So, when I finish, I’m relieved, with a side dish of woohoo. When I shared, my friend said, with real frustration: “Every time I think I’ve done a good workout, I hear what you’ve done, and I feel like a loser.”
Crap. My first instinct was guilt. Am I a jerk? Why did I even need to say it? Did I offer the news in a showoff tone? Was my timing bad? Out for dinner on a Friday night. I am still thinking through how I might have said things better or whether I should have held off. I’m still examining my own motivations for sharing. Why do I even need to? (Even as I’m sharing my accomplishment here, too).
Sure, I know that the comparison isn’t mine to manage. Still, I don’t want to make my friend feel bad. Nor do I want to have the wind sucked out of my sails. The math her brain ran wasn’t her workout versus her goals. It was her workout versus mine. And she felt like she’d lost. And then I lost, too. Because comparison is a rigged game. Nobody wins.
This is happening all the time. Someone gets a promotion and we audit our own career, instead of truly celebrating their achievement. Someone posts a beautiful photo of themselves, and we scrutinize ourselves in the mirror, alert to everywhere the crow has stepped. The scoreboard is running 24/7 in the background, and we are behind.
I have those game announcer voices, telling me someone else has more. More success. More money. More love. More beauty. More … you name it. All of which can spiral me down the I’m not enough drain. So much noise.
When is anything enough?
I know. You know. We know. Enough is enough when we decide that it is so. We live in a maelstrom of enablers (hello social media), which inundate us with opportunities to compare and despair. The real accounting has to happen inside our own selves, or it will eat at us in perpetuity.
Our work is to find that tiny pause between the comparison and the collapse. My longtime mindfulness practice serves me here. When I give the voices space to rant and offer them gentle support. Plus, the slow accumulation of wisdom that comes from long years of repeatedly recognizing the fruitlessness of comparison.
There’s no finite supply of fitness, or success, or beauty, or achievement being divided up among us. My enough does not necessitate someone else’s not enough. Even if the voices inside our heads want us to believe that this life is a zero-sum game.
Oh, and also, when I told my youngest brother that I’d run my April 21k, he told me that he’d done seventeen (yes, 17) 21k runs already this year. Did I feel frustrated? Maybe the teeny, tiniest bit. Mostly, I thought, wow. He’s on a streak. Also, youngster!
On May 1st, I did my 21k for the month. I woke up with that pre-run anxiety. I arrived home on my doorstep with a thrill. A reminder of the joy that lives inside my body.
In 1998, we were traveling in Australia. That was a lifelong dream of mine. As far back as 4th grade I read books about animals. I began dreaming about parts of the world where they were widespread and different. Now, at last, with Bruce (my husband), daughters, and friends, we were there. This day we were in Queensland. We had seen the Barrier Reef, the giant clams, the enormous cod and all sorts of colorful creatures. Then, off to dinner and a good night’s sleep.
I woke up to find one of our friends sitting next to me, chin on hand, staring thoughtfully. He’s a doctor. My husband & I shared a room with a good friend whose mobility is severely limited (we’ve been good friends since high school). She told me I’d had a grand mal seizure. She had recognized it and, from her experience as a special-ed speech therapist, had been able to talk Bruce through it. The others had called a local doctor. He arrived, checked a few things then asked, “Do you know where you are?” I looked around. The whole thing had, to me, a pretty Alice in Wonderland feeling. Dream-like. I hadn’t thought to question anything. But now, I realized I had no idea where I was. A trip planned for 30 years, and it was gone?
Fortunately, the memory of everything through the previous evening came back. And the doctor said we could continue to travel (phew) but I’d need a cat scan if it happened again. He thought I’d had “a one-off fit.” So we finished the trip, but when I got back home, I went straight to my doctor, who sent me to a neurologist, who got an MRI, which showed the tumor. Surgery followed, then lots of MRIs & follow-up care. And, since my tumor was very low grade, a projected life expectancy of 10-15 years. In the brain cancer world, that is great. But for the 46-year-old hearing it, not so great.
Once I had grown somewhat accustomed to my new reality, it occurred to me that I’d better give up procrastination. I suppose we all think of that as a pretty good new year’s resolution, but this time, I meant it, and I followed up. And one of my top priorities had been to get back in shape. I had been running the family business and raising daughters, and there just wasn’t a ton of time out there. My daughters were, by now, away at college, so that excuse was no good any more. So I got a stationary bike – the old kind with nothing but a seat, handlebars and pedals. And I put in a half hour every day, and it began to make quite a difference.
After a few months, Bruce kept telling me how boring that was, and that I really needed to get out on a real bike. Eventually, I caved in, and got a hybrid bike and began to take cautious rides along local paths. I got up to 5 miles! Ten miles! He got me out to ride to a local reservoir, a ride that included some traffic and a final climb of 100 feet or so. I thought, 1) I might die from the effort, and 2) I must have climbed something roughly equivalent to Mount Everest.
And one more change, and then another: I joined a women’s bike club; I cured tendinitis caused by lugging the heavy hybrid bike onto the commute train by buying the road bike the shop guys recommended; I was so impressed by the lightness & easy riding – once I had overcome my fear of such a delicate vehicle – that I signed up for the following year’s AIDS ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
And so many things followed. More AIDS rides (there’s quite a story there, since when I finished the first one, I said to myself, well, I’ll never have to do that again!); lots of touring and leading local endurance training rides, some running, some strength training, some yoga, and lots and lots of tap dance. That was already a regular thing – my older daughter was in STOMP! for a couple of years & we went to tap festivals together.
Somewhere in the fitness journey, I stumbled across this blog, and loved it! I can go on with my stories, but first I want to thank all of you who write here for the inspiration and support you have given. And to apologize for the somewhat haphazard pace of my comments. I have comments in my head for almost every post I read, and only seem to get a few of them out to you. So thanks so much for all you have done to help this journey!
Quick Bio: I am a lifelong Californian. I have a husband, two daughters, and five grandchildren. I spent 40+ years in the family business, taking over when my father retired. I have served on a couple of school boards and worked with several non-profits and several individuals who needed help. My lucky life makes me very eager to pay it forward. My current fitness makes me very eager to see the world from a bike saddle.
Me at about age 10 with what I think was my second bike. 3 speeds, and we often had to wear dresses. Me holding my bike overhead at the half way point on the AIDS ride from SF to LA. The third is a picture of me and Bruce having ridden up Waimea Canyon on Kauai.
Cognitive surrender is an essential new term that’s arisen to describe the abdication of our own reasoning to a machine that sounds fluent, confident, and authoritative. Studies are showing that when people interact with AI tools, they accept flawed reasoning at a startling level (almost 75% of the time). Not because they don’t have the capacity to reason better themselves. But because it is easier not to question. As a writer, it will likely come as no surprise that I’m leery of outsourcing. I worry about dulling not just my cognitive capacity, even more so my creativity.
And, yes, I have started working with AI tools, because I also think it’s important to understand what these machines are all about and how I might use them in an un-surrendered manner. I almost used the word collaborate in that last sentence, instead of use. I chose not to, because I’m not yet ready to acknowledge these machines as entities. That feels like surrender. This from someone who is more than willing to see trees as sentient beings well before reading Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears.
I am exploring the border between surrender and leveraging these cognitive machines to free my time for deeper engagement with the world. More akin to my vacuum cleaner than a friend.
I have been thinking a lot about surrender in my body, too. Every time I read an article about aging and activity, which tells me that I should move more gently, now that I’m on the verge of a new decade, a part of me growls protectively. Not yet.
This physical version of surrender can be seductive. Messaging that encourages the little voices that say: I’m older now. Intensity is harder. Recovery is harder. Maybe I should just… let these things be harder. Be gentle with myself. Slow down. Stop. Lie down. The End. Okay—those last four are the hyperbole kicking in.The reasoning (without exaggeration) arrives fluently, confidently, with authority. And, as with AI reasoning, if I’m not careful, I might accept these blandishments about aging without interrogating the particularities of my own case.
I see the parallel this way: an authoritative-seeming signal in the form of an AI answer or an aging body; the availability of a path of least resistance; the ways that acceptance is not neutral, reshaping what we expect of ourselves and ultimately what we are actually capable of.
What the cognitive surrender research captures is that the problem isn’t using external tools. We humans have been off-loading cognitive tasks for a while now. Thank you, calculators. The red flag is what happens when we stop verifying. When silken reasoning substitutes for truth. When we accept not because we’ve evaluated, but because it’s so frictionless (and pleasant) to not expend the effort.
In the physical realm, adjusting our expectations as we age is not always surrender. Of course not. Surrender is unexamined acceptance. Letting the message of limitation go unchallenged. Sliding past the effort of finding out just what we are still capable of.
I turn 60 this year. I’d like to say I feel easy, breezy about that. I don’t. I’m in search of the right balance of grace and grit. I have set myself the goal of running a half marathon (21 kilometers or 13.1 miles) every month. Twelve months, twelve runs (among all the other runs I will do). When I was younger, that distance was a regular sized effort. Last year, I did not run that distance even once. And my year culminated in foot surgery in late November (which I wrote about here).
The decision has an element of stubbornness, to be sure. I am a Taurus, after all. On New Year’s Day, I started the year running 21k with my brother on mountain trails. I had a genuine concern that I would not run the whole distance. It took a while. I got it done. I was inspired. And so, this challenge. As I write this, four 21k are done. Eight to go.
I hear the voices that tell me: You’re not built for this anymore. I’m checking their veracity. They might be right. I might not be up for the challenge. I want to be gentle with myself, if I’m not. This is not about punishment. It’s about exaltation. The joy of discovering, each month, that I still have the capacity.
When I was a child, my mother always made us take the stairs. I remember glancing longingly at elevators as we passed them by. Now I live on the eighth floor, and I take the stairs almost every time I leave or come home. Not always. I’m realistic, not rigid. Not because I’m proving something. Because the habit of not surrendering has become its own kind of instinct. My mother was training something in me: the reflex to push gently against the available convenience, to stay curious about what I might actually be capable of.
The AI researchers found that people with higher fluid IQ scores were more likely to maintain their own judgment under pressure. I do not claim any extra intelligence. I think gentle resistance is more about habit. The habit of fact checking.
This is what I want to hold onto as I run my way through this year, one half marathon at a time. Not the delusion that there no limits that come with age. I have plenty. Instead, I want to cultivate the discipline of inquiry, to distinguish real limits from the limits that are presented with confidence, waiting for me to accept them without scrutiny.
My body, like a large language model, will tell me what it thinks I want to hear in smooth and reasonable tones. Rest. Take the elevator. Watch Netflix.
Sometimes my body is right. And I will be dancing with surrender and resistance, until I find the choreography that leads to graceful, gritty acceptance.
If, like me, you’re a habitual maker of lists, you know how enjoyable it can be to make one. I want to tell you about the two kinds of lists I tend to make.
The first type is a detailed, four-quadrant list that is legibly handwritten in a spiral notebook. It’s a strategy I learned from leadership training years ago: draw two lines bifurcating the left and right, top and bottom of the page. Top left: IMMEDIATE to-dos. Top right: TODAY to-dos. Bottom left: TOMORROW to-dos. Bottom right: LATER THIS WEEK. Now there’s four lists! 🤩
This 4-list system has helped me triage competing demands and deadlines in a busy life schedule. As the top half got completed by the end of the day, I’d feel that little list-hit of dopamine. More satisfaction would come when tomorrow’s items were ALL scratched off and became today’s.
My second style of list is a scrawl of half-expressed ideas onto the back of a mail envelope, program flyer, or receipt. These lists get folded and stuffed into my pockets or become bookmarks, only to be discovered later, partly deciphered partly forgotten.
Over the past few months I have not had the discipline of a tidy schedule. My flâneuse-style wandering has reflected in my list-making. I tried to make a type 1 list, but items didn’t easily sort when my “today” and “tomorrow” have been so fluid. Instead, the type 2 lists catch my daily thoughts before they dissolve, little messy scraps that reveal how I am figuring out what shape my life takes next.
List Type 2: A handwritten list on the back of a Saje sales receipt: CAAT, 4-piece snaps, unemployment (CHECK!), City of London, MOI. What does it all mean? I hardly know myself.
Adam Grant has a WorkLife episode on procrastination where he suggests writing a to don’t list to make visible what’s might be delaying one’s progress and help get yourself out of your own way. That’s not a bad idea, especially when big life transitions mean the work of processing hard feelings, managing stress, and trying to find small wins.
So I’m giving a type 3 list a try. Moving into my next life phase, which doesn’t yet have neat time-bound quadrants, I write neatly down the centre of the page:
Don’t be hard on yourself.
Don’t fail to appreciate what you have.
Don’t seek certainty at the expense of your joy.
Don’t not trust yourself. (Double negative, but you get it.)
This third type of list has turned out to be important, not because it tells me what I need to do but because it reminds me who I want to be.
One of the many things I love about this blog and these bloggers is the consistent message that we are okay as we are, and that our lives can and should be happening NOW, not wait around until we’ve achieved some other body size or proportion. Time and time again we’ve called out the fitness industry for promoting body size and proportion changes as if they are the most important aspect of engaging in physical activity.
The before/after photos are especially objectionable to me for this reason. In addition to being misleading and probably photoshopped, they add on the emotional force of equating the before state with being unhappy, unattractive, unfit, unwell, unacceptable for public view. Of course this isn’t accurate.
Then comes the after state, depicted in more colorful or fashionable attire, better lighting, and of course smiles (in addition to body shape and proportion changes that reflect stereotypical views about what the fit or acceptable or attractive body is supposed to look like).
Despite that fact that we know all this, before/after photos are everywhere. The rise in use of GLP-1 weight loss drugs has brought them back with the vengeance on social media and in advertisements for online hawkers selling compounded forms of the drug (a very bad idea, btw).
One new twist on the before/after messaging was a series of ads I saw on Facebook, selling an exercise program. It kept saying, “you’ll be unrecognizable in eight weeks if you do this”.
Ew. No. I don’t want to be unrecognizable. I mean, what would happen at work? People would say, “excuse me, where is Catherine? And why are you in her office?”
Seriously though, you get the idea. In January and February (which is the new January, as we know), we are pummeled with ads selling exercise and diet programs, promising us quick transformation. I’m not opposed to transformation– in fact, I spend a lot of time working on projects that I hope will be transformative. I write, meditate, and do creative tasks in part to find new insights that change the way I see the world.
I do physical activity because I have goals, but also because it makes me feel good. Or great. It does change me, but in more complex ways than a mere photo can capture.
Here’s my one exception to the no before/after pics rule: when I get my hair cut. Here’s what I posted to my book group signal thread.
Me, before haircut. Admittedly well overdue for a trim.
During hair transformation. After washing, all turbaned up. I wish I could manage this look at home.
Now, without further ado, the after-haircut salon-pristine pics.
Full-face view, smiling and sleek.Turned a little, for mystery.
Readers, what do you think of before/after pictures? And more importantly, do you like my new haircut?
I have been experimenting with when and how to write different things, I have experimented with different ways to approach my volunteer work, I have given a lot of thought to how ELSE my Go Team ideas might apply in my life, and I have experimented with my well-being practices.
Here are some of the things that have come up for me so far and some questions I am pondering at the moment.
As soon as I mention pondering, I gotta break out a Pinky and the Brain GIF. Image description: a GIF from the cartoon Pinky and the Brain in which The Brain (a short white mouse with an oversized head) is asking Pinky (a tall skinny mouse who looks kind of goofy) ‘Are you pondering what I’m pondering?’ The mice are in a homey setting within a green cage in a laboratory. This question always came up in episodes of this show when The Brain, who was supposed to be a genius, had hatched a plan to take over the world and Pinky, who was rather silly, would respond with nonsense.
My medal from the Salem Witch Trials walking challenge. The medal is a black rectangle is kind of like a wrought iron gate along the top and sides with four points along the bottom line. The medal is decorated with a crescent moon, a sun, a crow on a branch and a bat hanging from a different branch. Then there is text that reads ‘The Salem Witch Trial Virtual Challenge’ The words ‘Salem Witch’ are in green and the lettering is ornate and kind of spooky. It is attached to a green ribbon with decorated with stereotypical ‘witchy’ items like beetles, moths, crystals, a dousing rod, and a fly agaric mushroom and a purple banner that reads ‘Make Every Mile Count.’
It’s really fun to have a tangible, obvious, and related reward for my efforts.
While I am very used to activities in which the effort is its own reward or ones in which I decide on my own ‘prize’ that often has nothing to do with the activities itself but this is different.
While I set my timeframe, the distance and the reward were both set by someone else and I enjoy the feeling of meeting some sort of standard (even a loose one) and getting a medal as a result.
Now, let me be clear – I am in no way treating this like a medal that I won. I know I wasn’t actually racing. I didn’t have any competitors except myself and my time was snail-paced but the medal does remind me that I made a choice to do a program and I completed it.
The fact that I really like how the medal looks is also a bonus.
My feelings about this medal – and the related challenge – are really interesting to me and I am definitely going to explore more tangible and related rewards for my other fitness experiments this year.
And this is where the January experimenting comes in:
I decided to experiment with a longer challenge so I signed up for a 2026 challenge with the same company and, like with the shorter challenge, the fact that I can see each day adding up is giving me a little extra push to move more daily.
BUT it will take all year to earn my medal so I’m going to need to invent some more immediate (and related) awards for myself to earn on a regular basis.
Question: What kinds of rewards will feel more directly related to my fitness practices?
Imperfect Practices
Several of my Go Team 2026 posts have been a bit of a thought experiment for me as I figure out whether I am regularly applying these ideas to my life/practices and how ELSE I might want to apply them.
My Sunday post this week is an excellent example of that experimentation.
That post Done Beats Perfect is about getting so caught up in doing things right that I end up not doing them at all has really helped me tune into something about myself.
I have ‘discovered’ this fact many times in many different contexts but each time I rediscover it, I find a new layer.
I spend too much time trying to figure things out before doing them.
For example:
My ADHD brain is convinced that there is value in waiting to start work on my core because I wouldn’t want to waste time on some practice or program that doesn’t work.
So, it kind of shelves the project of improving my core while awaiting more information BUT it keeps the thought in rotation so it FEELS like I am working on it all the time even though I am not actually doing any work.
But since it has been on my mind for ages, I do get the bonus (annoying) feeling that I am not getting any results for my hard work.
So, a lot of time passes, I don’t end up finding the right system for strengthening my core AND I don’t actually work on a less than perfect system AND nothing changes AND I feel frustrated with myself.
This is all kind of subconscious and I see the illogical nature of this process when I consciously consider it.
But until it occurs to me to bring the thought forward I just have this annoying contradictory situation in which something is sort of on my mind, time is passing, there’s a feeling of effort but no results, but I also know that I am not actually working on that yet.
It’s a bit like when I sit down to write but I can’t make the words string together at the moment so I sit at my desk and putter around at all kinds of distractions. I feel like I am working on it and getting nowhere but there is actually no work taking place.
In that situation, I need to become aware that I am doing that (again!) and remind myself that the only thing that gets my writing done is putting words on the page and then moving them around. I have to coax myself to stick with it past the initial pain of dealing with an ambiguous situation and trust that if I go through the tried-and-true procedure, the work will get done.
Since I know that completing an imperfect workout or an imperfect practice will be automatically superior to a perfect one that never actually gets done, I need to identify a tried-and-true procedure that I can trust to get my workouts/practices done.
I am going to work on the following questions and develop an experiment based on my answers:
Questions: What procedures can I use to make it easier to do an imperfect workout instead of waiting for a perfect one to arrive?How can I make myself conscious of being stuck in the ‘waiting for more info’ loop?
My plan to connect my drawing to my evening yoga has resulted in me avoiding my yoga because I couldn’t wrap my mind around drawing at that point.
I know that the main reason I didn’t draw was because I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to draw each evening. Frustratingly, in my post about this experiment I actually said that I needed to pick something to draw or I probably wouldn’t do it.
Alas, I forgot all about that aspect of things then just tried to wing it and ended up (temporarily) sinking my yoga practice along with my plan to draw.
So, for now, I am going back to committing to evening yoga and, if I have the energy, I will do a drawing on an index card but the drawing is a bonus not a dealbreaker.
And I am going to consider the following questions and have an answer to experiment with by Wednesday evening:
Questions: What kinds of drawing would be fun and relaxing for me to do each evening? How can I make the process of drawing easier to start?
Row Row Row… my living room?
This experiment is less than two days old but after hearing me wonder aloud if moving my rowing machine from the basement to the living room would make it more likely that I would use it, my husband volunteered to move it for me.
As soon as it was in the living room, rowing felt more like a thing I *could* do instead of a thing ‘I need to get back to’ and now that the living room experiment was underway, I decided to try for 5 minutes of rowing each day for the next week.
I know that’s a small amount but I wanted it to feel easy and I can definitely fit in 5 minutes a day for a week and then review.
So, on Monday morning, I planned to row for 5 minutes but ended up rowing for 15 minutes while watching a video about setting up an artist’s notebook. and it really felt great.
That doesn’t mean that I am changing my experiment though. I am going to stick to the 5 minute plan with the option of doing more but with zero pressure to do so.
Now I am just playing around with the when:
Question: Is it easier to have a set time to row or to just do it when it makes sense on a given day?
Overall, I’m enjoying the experiment approach and I am planning to continue into February.
Have you been doing any experiments with your practices and habits in January? How are things going?
I decided to draw my own calendars this year. This one is above my desk and will have a different robot for each month. Image description: a happy square-headed, rectangular-bodied robot drawn in blue ink. She is holding a sign that says ‘Real Snow Please!’ in one hand and she is holding a star in the other. She is standing on a curved line that is supposed to represent snow on the ground and there are dots in the background to represent snow falling. Text beneath her reads ‘January’ and there are two snowflakes and two horizontal arrows pointing to the word.
I’m really tempted to say that I’m going to do one thing for the first month, but we all know that’s not true.
Except that it kind of is.
My themes for the year are practice and process and I’ve picked ONE particular aspect to focus on in January.
My focus is going to be on experimenting*.
In particular, I’m experimenting with scheduling my fitness and well-being practices.
So even though I’ll be trying lots of things, they’re really all in-service of that one thing – finding a comfortable schedule that lets me include all of the things I want to do on a regular basis.
It’s a practice that fits in nicely with my usual Planuary approach.**
I have found that evening is a good time for me to do yoga and morning is a good time for meditation, but I haven’t found the best time for journalling yet.
So that’s part of the January experiment.
I’ll keep you updated!
Speaking of updates:
Back in October, I started a walking challenge and I completed that on December 20. (My medal is in the mail!)
Last week, I signed up for a year-long challenge with the same company.
For these challenges, many people add their daily step count from their fitness tracker or that kind of thing***but I wanted to encourage myself to add more activity to my life on a regular basis so including my routine steps would be counterproductive.
Instead, I decided that I would only include extra activity that I deliberately chose to do- walks, dance videos, strength training – any activity that I did for the sake of moving. (FYI – the app converts many activities to an equivalent distance.)
And I enjoyed how my commitment to the challenge gave me extra motivation to seek out some exercise on a regular basis.
I’m following the same pattern with the current challenge – only adding deliberately chosen activities so I know that every kilometre was ‘travelled’ on purpose.
I’ll keep you in the loop on this, too.
Khalee approves of my walking challenge but she was very confused as to why I stopped to take her picture today instead of just continuing to walk. Image Description: My dog, Khalee, who is medium-sized and has short light-brown hair is standing on a snowy road that has one lane plowed. (It’s a suburban side street, we weren’t in danger!) she is standing looking to the left so we can see her entire left side, and her head is turned slightly towards us. She is wearing a light blue harness and a darker blue leash. The leash extends from her towards the lower part of the image on the right, where I am holding the leash in my right hand, but you can’t see that.
**As I said in one of my December posts, I actually managed to do a little January planning in December this time. Will wonders never cease?
I mean, I still have other things I want to plan but I feel good about having the capacity to think about January while so was still in December. Christine 1: ADHD 0 (in that situation, at least!)
***Zero criticism intended here. That’s a totally valid way to approach these challenges, it just wouldn’t serve my purposes.
So, I started November with a reasonable plan and lots of time to get it done.
Two weeks ago, I was on track to complete most of my list.
Then I started having trouble with my arms. It’s kind of hard to describe but basically I had something going on with my shoulders that was inflaming a nerve? tendon? string? piece of spaghetti? And it caused a pain down the back of both of my arms and made my forearms ache and my wrists hurt.
I could tell by the nature of the problem that it wasn’t anything serious but it did get worse when I moved my arms too much and got better when I rested.
So, in the interest of minimizing my arm annoyances, I rested as much as possible and I dropped some things off my list for this month:
Try a calisthenics video
Continue the stretch band strength training program from October
Go swimming
30 minutes on the rowing machine
Sure, this was a bit frustrating but I am proud to say that I was quite kind to myself in the process and I don’t feel at all bad about it.
And, as a result of changing my plan and increasing my rest, my arm annoyances are almost completely gone.*
The list below is what got done (or partially done) in November.
Perhaps I should only give myself partial points for partially done tasks but since I did everything I could do for each task I’m just flicking the metaphorical switch to done and giving myself the point.
After all, I am the boss of me and I get to make these decisions.
Done! It was really hard to commit to the idea of being relatively still for so long and my brain fought me on getting started but eventually I talked myself into it. It was just as great as I hoped it would be.
Do at least one 10 minute meditation per week
Done! I did this once a week for the first three weeks and then switched to every day for the last 12 days of the month.
Find a way to elevate keyboard for a standing writing session
Dan and I are still working on this.
Journal while sitting on the floor once a week
Done! In fact, I journaled on the floor more often than this and watched TV on the floor and read on the floor quite a bit. This, after all, was more about spending time on the floor than about journaling.
Practice those three tricky TKD patterns for at least 30 minutes (total)
Partially done! Obviously, having wonky arms affected my practice in this area too.
So, I’m calling November a success, too.
Why?
Well, 7/11 is a pass, obviously.
And I did what I could with what I had.
And I pushed myself a little but respected my capacity.
And I felt good about the things I could do when I did them.
If that’s not a success, I don’t know what is!
Go me!
Now I just have to make a plan for December…
*I can only assume that my stellar attitude about change was key factor in healing as well. (Christine pats herself on the back. Metaphorically, of course.)
(In case you are wondering, the painting is the ghost of Christmas present)
Rien n’est plus précieux que le temps. (Nothing is more precious than time.)
I was let go from my full-time job recently at a time when my entire sector is struggling. A sympathetic colleague signed off on a supportive message to me with “Stay well.”
Wellness is the focus of much career transition advice I have read so far (on websites, the job program I am in, etc.). Some of it makes sense for anyone: see friends, do exercise, get outside, eat good food, get enough sleep. Some is specific to the emotions and challenges that go along with unexpected job loss: name your feelings, make prudent budget cuts, consider making time to upskill, etc.
Some wellness advice focuses on being mindful about next steps: take time to reflect on and even rethink one’s career goals and job hunting strategy. One piece I read warns against running right back to look for similar jobs when “pursuing a similar role might be the first step in letting history repeat itself.”
It all seems aimed at putting me in a space where I can discover new, even undiscovered, paths ahead for me. But it is a circuitous route: taking time away from looking for work in order to find it. And for a self-admitted workaholic, all this not looking for work feels like work. It is hard to enjoy free time when it is imposed…and the clock ticks with no secure income.
As my brain has been chewing on the work of wellness, I happened to think of flânerie, which one blogger describes as being “all about experiencing the world with an open heart and an unhurried spirit.” In the 19th century, wealthy French male flâneurs walked and wandered the urban cityscapes in a detached, observational way “to appreciate the world […] in its simplest form, free from the pressures of time.” Another way to put it is that they were idlers, which some saw as lazy and others saw as radical.
Paul Gavarni, Le Flâneur, 1842.
Should flâneurs be my wellness gurus right now? You can’t disagree that it’s nearly always a good idea to get out for a walk. In the context of job loss, “staying well” may require some serendipitous, open-heartedfrench wandering. Getting idle in order to see what’s around the next corner. Maybe I will start with Lauren Elkin’s book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (2017).
Not being of the elite class, however, I only have a limited time to be free from the pressure of time. I can only afford to make flânerie part-time work.
What is your experience with wellness during job loss, and how much work was it “work” to try to savour the time?
