FIFI bloggers often write about their adventures fundraising for various causes: Sam’s pedaling for Parkinson’s springs immediately to mind, but she has a whole list of upcoming rides. I often swim at Bring on the Bay, sometimes raising funds for Easter Seals and sometimes supporting other swimmers. As a swim angel, I can’t fundraise directly, but you can support anyone from my club here.
Last week I spent a whole day being active while volunteering. It’s one of the nicer things about being retired.
First up, I spent two hours picking mulberries with Hidden Harvest, an organization that harvests unwanted fruit and gets it to various agencies addressing food insecurity in Ottawa. It wasn’t super strenuous, but there was plenty of reaching and bending.
My next stop was a three hour shift with the National Capital Commission’s archaeology program. As part of its commitment to reconciliation, the NCC tests every site that might have been used by Indigenous communities before any construction or other work is done. In this case, we dug test pits in a field that is to be reforested.
Each pit is about 18 by 18 inches, and we dug down until we hit undisturbed soil – sometimes two feet or more deep. Every shovelful of dirt then had to be screened for artefacts. I think we managed four holes in three hours. We didn’t find anything of significance, so it looks like the reforestation project will go ahead.
Top: Laila, the archaeology summer student, takes photos and measurements of our work. The dirt we have sifted sits below the sieve on a blue tarp in the foreground, waiting to be returned to the hole once she is done. Bottom: some of the mulberries from our harvest.
This month’s Action for Happiness theme is ‘Jump Back Up July’ and their calendar is full of small steps to help you build your resilience, to increase your ability to face challenges, to notice your strengths, and to be kinder to yourself.
Now, as I am sure you can guess, I don’t really think that we have to *jump* back up every single time but even staggering back up gets us back up and trying again.
Cultivating the inner fortitude to try again when things go awry, to be compassionate when we make mistakes, to ask for help when need it, to reframe challenges, and to nurture hope throughout the process can serve us well in so many areas of our lives (including fitness!) that the effort to build our resilience skills is worth the effort.
Even though many of these practices are already in my regular repertoire, I’m going to make a point of practicing them during Jump Back Up July (or Get Back Up At Your Own Pace Using Your Choice of Movements July which is more accurate for me but far less catchy. 😉 )
The ‘Jump Back Up July’ calendar from Action for Happiness. I will, of course, be using this for ‘Get Back Up At Your Own Pace Using Your Own Choice Of Movements July’ too. Image description: A calendar for July 2026 with each block coloured in a repeating pattern of dark green, light green, orange, and yellow. The text in each block is a daily tip for building the skills to ‘Jump Back Up’ and the edges of the calendar are decorated with black and white cartoon images of people doing resilience activities such as hugging someone or carefully repairing a loved object.
And here’s a tip video from Action for Happiness featuring Vanessa King:
A video from the Action for Happiness YouTube channel called ‘Coping with challenging times. Jump Back Up July with Vanessa King’ on the left side is a still image of Vanessa King, a middle-aged white-presenting woman with reddish blonde hair that is pulled back from her face on the sides and top but with her bangs curling down towards her eyebrows. She is wearing brown-framed glasses, a black shirt, and a green scarf decorated with white flowers and gold-coloured leaves. She is looking towards the camera and smiling and there are two books and a vase of flowers behind her. On the right side of the image is a light blue rectangle with text that reads ‘Resilience. Bouncing Back’ in red and ‘3 top tips with Vanessa King’ in yellow.
Here are a few links about resilience that you may want to check out:
If it has been a while, then please take this post as a sign to pat yourself on the back, congratulate yourself, and claim your gold star.
And if you congratulated yourself earlier today?
Well, pat yourself on the back, congratulate yourself again, and claim your gold star.
If you’re like me, there will be times when you are really challenging yourself and times when you are just kind of treading water.
Both are good.
In fact, the whole range of ways to show up are all good.
And I’d like you to celebrate every one of them.
I am proud of you for showing up when it’s fun and I’m proud of you for showing up when it’s annoying to be there.
And I hope that, overall, you get more fun than annoyance but here’s your gold star for your efforts either way.
Go Team Us!
I’ve been trying out gold star cards with encouraging text and I like how this one turned out. Image description: a black card with a small painting of a gold star on the left side. On the right side is a piece of white card with rounded corners that says, in black text, “ this gold star celebrates your hard work, the effort you put into showing up every time. Congratulations! I’m so proud of you.” The white card is framed in black with a gold frame outside of the black one. There is a thick gold line a little ways under the star that also extends downward underneath the white card.
I packed good snacks, I made sure to buy breakfast in the airport, I moved the things I planned to do on the plane to the top of my backpack, and I walked around a fair bit and did a little meditation in the airport to ensure that I was as unfrazzled as possible when I got on the plane.
Once I was in my seat, I put my papers, markers, and water bottle in the pouch on the seat ahead of me and made myself as comfortable as possible in the cramped space.
After take-off, I made a loose plan of how I wanted to spend my time and set my repeat timer so I didn’t feel like any task was going to go on forever.
The timer will let me choose a length of time to work and a length of time to rest and how many times to repeat the cycle. It’s really handy, especially since my ADHD brain will sometimes refuse to start something – even something fun – if it feels like it will take a lot of time. Setting a timer creates an escape hatch and makes it easier to start.
So I alternated between reading, drawing, writing, and taking notes on some YouTube videos I had downloaded and took breaks for snacks, for stretching, for napping, and for meditating.
Here’s one of my drawings from the plane. image description: a drawing of overlapping circles with about half of them filled in with patterns on an index card drawn in black ink. The card is resting on an airplane table and a marker and my grey pencilcase is nearby.
The flight to Calgary for my stopover felt pretty fast but I did have one recurring annoyance because of time math.
If I were to write it as a story problem, it would go like this.
The first part of Christine’s trip is a 6h 20min flight to Calgary where she will have a 1h 5min wait before her flight to Victoria. If her initial flight from St. John’s to Calgary leaves 1h late but the pilot says that the flight will only take 5h 30mins, will she make her connecting flight?
And yeah, the math works out but when you factor in me wondering if I had misheard the pilot, and my concern that I had miscalculated time difference (Is this a factor? no. Could I shake the concern loose? also no), I ended up with a low-key worry that I was going to miss my connecting flight and my arrangements to share a cab from the airport in Victoria were going to get jumbled.
I eventually realized I could ask the flight attendant and I felt better after that but the brainloop was irksome in the meantime.
I made the second flight, got to Victoria just a little late, had lunch with my storytelling friends (Hi to Cindy, Shelah, and Brigitte!) and got to campus feeling pretty damn good.
The conference was great – I heard some marvellous stories, took some terrific workshops, and I was thrilled with how my workshop and my story performance was received.*
On Sunday, I was heading back home via Ottawa. I was relaxed and looking forward to getting home and I got to chatting with different storytelling friends in the airport (Hi Colette and Gail!) and didn’t really give much thought to the practicalities of the trip.
Actually, I kind of forgot my ‘take good care of yourself’ strategy.
In fact, even the need for it slipped my mind.
So, when I started to feel a bit twitchy a little ways into the flight and then I realized that I wasn’t exactly sure how long we had been in the air, I realized that I needed a plan or I was going to drive myself and my seatmate bananas before we landed in Ottawa.
I did my best to calculate how long we had left in the flight and I set my repeat timer.
And, once again, I alternated between reading, listening to podcasts/videos, napping, writing, and meditating. I made sure to eat at regular intervals, to drink lots of water, and to do a bit of stretching.
This worked out pretty well, just not as well as it had on the way up and the flight felt loooooong.
Once I landed in Ottawa, I opted to walk around and stay standing for the hour or so wait so I could burn off some of the energy I built up sitting on the plane.
I did the same timer trick for the last part of my flight – with a few more nap/meditation times because it was late at night (my flight was supposed to arrive at 12:48am and actually got in at 1:30am) – and I made sure to have lots of water and a substantial snack so I could head right to bed when I got home instead of having to make time to eat.
Even though it was a relatively short flight, it did drag a bit because of the late hour and we got in at 1:30am it took forever to get off the plane and get my luggage so it was almost 2:30am before I got home.**
Why am I including those details?
Because the time of day makes it hard to tell how effective my strategy was on the way home.
I think, once you are up into the wee hours traveling, you kind of have to surrender to a certain amount of off-kilter feeling, no matter what you do.
But, I do think that I felt better than I would have if I had just tried to forge ahead through my travel without any distress-management plans.
However, I have to note that the disrupted sleep on Sunday night/Monday morning really left me feeling out of sorts for the rest of the week and I was decidedly out of sorts until the weekend.
That’s why I am writing and posting this a whole week later – I just couldn’t make my brain behave last week and I am grateful to @samanthabrennan for posting in my place on Tuesday past.
Overall, I think my lessons here are that making a plan and taking good care of myself really helps me travel with less fluster. AND that I should try to avoid flights that arrive in the very early hours of the morning.
I took this shortly after we left Ottawa. image description: A photo taken from a airplane window of the bright horizon at sunset. There is a dark area at the bottom, a stripe of red, then a stripe of orange, then lighter blue, then darker blue. In the foreground you can see the plane’s wing illuminated by one of the plane’s lights. It creates a great contrast to the dark in the middle of the image and the bright natural colours on the horizon.
*I taught an 1.5h workshop on how storytelling builds empathy and I performed a story about doing a tarot reading that asked, “What advice would my Dad give me?”
**Many thanks to the valiant Steve for picking me up at that late hour when he had to work in the morning!
By the time this post goes live, I’ll be on a plane on my way to BC for the Storytellers of Canada- Conteurs du Canada conference.
I’m looking forward to the conference and to seeing my friends and telling/talking about stories for DAYS but I always feel apprehensive before I travel.
I’m not afraid to fly or anything like that. It’s the disrupted schedule, the lack of control over my day, the eating at weird times, the crowds of people, the change in time zones…that’s what gets me.
And all of that is fairly unavoidable.
BUT
Then I remembered that the last time the conference was in BC my travel schedule was waaaaaaaay worse and I was miserable on the way up but I actually did ok on the way home.
And, sure, part of it was the fact that I was on my way home but, after the frustrating trip on the way there, I had decided to take really good care of myself on the return trip and it made a huge difference.
So, what did ‘taking really good care of myself’ mean in that context?
I brought some really filling snacks so I had a bit more control over when I ate.
I made sure to keep my water bottle full.
I did stretches and yoga frequently and did some walking in each airport.*
I planned something to do for each hour of the trip (I didn’t have to do it but having a plan made me less fidgety and irritated.)
And that plan seems really appealing to me right now.
In fact, once I thought about it, I immediately started feeling better about the long trip and I could focus more on the fun that awaits me on the other end.
So, let’s see how my plan works out, hey?
I’ll update you later tomorrow.
*Yes, I always *could* stretch or walk at any point but this was me being proactively deliberate about it.
It has been just over a year since Dad died, and and now I’m the one dealing with multiple health diagnoses. The heart is on the mend, following surgery for a condition that I had no idea about until my doctor caught it while checking for bronchitis. I’m on a waitlist to see someone about the concerning lumps on my thyroid, discovered when I went for a pre-operative CT scan. I’m finally getting around to being tested for sleep apnea after the nurses in hospital asked whether I had it.
In all three cases, there were signs I should have been paying attention to, but ignored. Dad ignored or downplayed his symptoms until nothing could be done. I’m trying really hard (now) to break that pattern of behaviour.
I think of these things as mostly being lessons from Dad, but some come from Mom too. Was it a generational thing? Or just my family dynamics? Thankfully it doesn’t seem to have been passed on to my kids so hopefully they have learned the lessons already.
Listen to your body;
Consider that what you are telling yourself is normal for your body may actually just mean you are stubborn;
Admit when things hurt or feel wrong;
Ask for help;
If you can’t ask, at least accept help when it’s offered;
Read up on what is considered “normal” so at least you have some sort of baseline for assessing whether you should be worried, or feel free to carry on with whatever gives you joy.
A smiling woman wearing dark clothes rides a blue bicycle with an orange basket on the front. She has both her feet off the pedals, stretched forward. Having done this just last week, I am pretty sure she is saying “wheeeee!”
My hips are very cranky lately and instead of just being annoyed most of the time and stretching when I think of it, I have decided to actually try to make them happier by doing some targeted exercises and stretches and the like.
Yes, I know that a problem with my hips is not an isolated thing – I probably have a whole series of cranky muscles that need some kind attention – but I also know that my brain loves falling into the trap of ‘if I can’t do everything, I won’t do anything’ so I have decided to start by focusing on my hips.
And since I also know that my brain gets easily bored exercise routines, I have decided that ‘focusing on my hips’ means ‘trying all kinds of different videos to see which ones my hips like best.
So, here is my ‘happier hips’ experiment:
Try each of these videos once over the next two weeks and see which ones we (me and my hips) like best.
Updates will follow as events warrant.
A video called ‘7 Tight Hip Stretches’ from the Ask Dr Jo YouTube channel. The still image shows Dr. Jo, a woman with light skin whose brown hair is pulled back in a bun, sitting on a mat on the floor with her hands on the mat behind her. Her right leg is bent at the knee with her foot on the floor and her left leg is bent with her knee facing the camera and her left foot on her right knee. She is facing the camera and she is mid-sentence.
a short YouTube video called ‘Tight Hips? You’re not alone’ from the Yoga with DJ channel. In the still image a person in a grey tank top and black shorts. with black framed glasses with their hair in a bun on top of their head sits on a black yoga mat with the soles of their feet touching each other and their knees pointed to the sides of the mat (butterfly pose), and they are using their hands to push downwards on their knees. There are shelves of plants behind them and their yoga mat is on light-coloured parquet flooring.
a video called ‘Gentle Yoga for Tight Hips’ from Yoga with Adriene. In the still image, Adriene, a woman with long dark hair and a happy expression is wearing back leggings and a black tshirt as she sits on a yoga mat that is divided long ways into two shades of green. Her hands are resting behind her on the mat and she is leaned back slightly. Her left foot is on the floor and her left knee is bent (pointed toward the ceiling) Her right leg is bent, her right foot is resting on her left leg, and her right knee is pointing away from the viewer. Her dog Benji is sleeping in front of her but near the back wall and a table with a plant and a decorative item on it is behind her to her right.
a video called ‘Hip CARs//For IT Band Syndrom, Piriformis Syndrome etc’ from Tom Morrison. The left hand side of the image is red with text reading ‘What is The Best Hip Mobility Drill Ever!?and the right shows Tom Morrison, a man with long hair wearing a black shirt and dark pants and a woman in a black shirt and grey capri leggings with her blonde hair in a high ponytail standing next to the frame of a machine at the gym. She is holding on to the frame and tipping her leg to one side to stretch her hips.
another Yoga with Adriene video. This one is called ‘Hip Mobility – Open Your Hips – 13 Minute Yoga practice and there’s still image shows her lying on her back on a light green yoga mat and she is wearing a one piece exercise suit that is both a tank top and leggings. She is making the figure 4 position with her legs. Her right leg is bent with the knee pointing away from the viewer and her right ankle is resting on her left thigh as she pulls her left thigh toward her with her hands .
This video from Oscar Moves is called ‘Give Me 4 Minutes. I’ll Fix Your Tight Hips.’ Still image is divided into halves. On the left, he is wearing a dark shirt and shorts and he is pushing down on his right leg near the knee with both hands. On the right side, he is wearing a green shirt and dark shorts and he is sitting with the souls of his feet together and his knees pointing out to either side in butterfly position and he looks relaxed.
This week flipped that upside down and lit it on fire.
I started on the holiday Monday with a list of things that needed to be done before fence replacement work would start on Wednesday.
My youngest kid, Jean, came over. We dug up plants to move them out of danger. We moved and flipped the contents of two composters.
Michel cleaned out our garage and mowed.
Dividing and conquering we got lots done.
Tuesday was even more frenetic gardening.
Wednesday my contractor arrived and I puttered around outside and kept myself available.
Thursday I gardened at my place for three hours before flitting over to Heather’s for some visiting, snacking and, oh yes, two solid rounds of weeding. Then back home for more outdoor work.
Nat grimacing at the camera. Her face says “not so little but very often”
Friday, more work on my gardens in the morning and time with my friend Phyllis in the afternoon. I brought her scant amount of transplants and in return she filled my car with plants.
I got home, had a light dinner then quickly set to work planting all my new plants so that Saturday’s rain will help them adapt to their new home.
This has been a boon to my average step count. I’ve been averaging 9,500 a day over the past year. This week I averaged over 13,000.
A bar graph showing values for each day of the last week ranging from 8,000 to 18,000 steps on a given day.
Somewhere in there I had physiotherapy and a massage. I’m taking care not to aggravate my lower back and stick to daily physio exercises.
It is pretty typical that I put a lot of effort into my gardens in the spring. This year I feel like I’m making fast progress. I want my gardens to be lush and full of life without looking unkempt. It’s tricky because my garden is informal and uses a lot of native plants, folks sometimes think it’s merely overgrown.
Here’s to my efforts reducing a bit over the coming weeks as I focus more on writing and crafting.
I am solidly in the messy, frustrating middle of so many projects right now – fitness and otherwise.
And it is taking a lot of effort to keep working away at stuff instead of ditching everything and starting over.
The middle of any project is rarely fun but it can be especially dreadful for those of us with ADHD. The novelty has worn off, there’s a lot of trial and error, and everything seems very, very dull.
My brain really wants me to
start some new stories instead of working on ones that need revising.
try some new exercises instead of sticking with my walking/yoga/mobility routine.
buy new containers to store stuff instead of decluttering (decluttering = so many choices to make -ugh!)
try some new drawing techniques instead of improving my current skills.
invent different workshops and projects instead of finishing and promoting the ones I am already working on.
(don’t even get me started on my volunteer projects!)
But despite the noise my brain is making about this, I know that starting something new – in any category- will only be temporarily fun.
Pretty soon that new, fun thing will be at the messy middle stage and I’ll be annoyed all over again.
And, even though my brain has doubts, I know that I will REALLY enjoy when I finally finish something, when I can feel a difference in my body or my mind, and when I can see some of the progress I have made.
The only way to get to that real enjoyment is to keep inching everything forward, to add fun and novelty where I can, and to keep reminding myself that it is extra fun to actually finish something – even if that time feels very far away at the moment.
So, Team, even allowing for ADHD-related intensity, I’m pretty sure that ‘Why is the middle so annoying?’ is a pretty common feeling.
In fact, being annoyed with any part of any process seems pretty common.
You might be annoyed with the details required to get started or the details required to finish up.
You might find the middle incredibly tedious.
The unknowns at the beginning might get on your nerves.
Figuring out the last few steps might be frustrating.
All of it makes sense and it is all perfectly ok.
Sure, your frustration might lead you to use a slightly different approach or it could mean you need a little break or need a little more support.
But none of those feelings of frustration automatically suggest that this project isn’t for you.*
And when they arise, you can remind yourself that they are part of your process and then find a way to forge ahead – perhaps slowly, perhaps after a break, perhaps with a little more fun added to the mix.
I’m not saying that it is easy to do that, just that it is possible.
And your effort will be worth it.
In fact, speaking of effort, here’s our gold star for our efforts today – no matter which part of the process we are in right now.
Go Team Us!
PS – Be kind to yourself out there, pretty please.
*Meanwhile, if every part of the project is frustrating every single time, then it may be time to consider whether the project is a good fit overall.
I’m not big on following trends, especially those using terms like “maxxing” but this one made me laugh because I may be a trendsetter.
What is nonnamaxxing? Apparently, it’s a viral TikTok thing that encourages people to adopt the habits of an Italian grandmother, or “nonna.” Things like cooking from scratch, daily walking, gardening, long family meals, real-world social interaction and reduced screen time.
I don’t do all of these things (especially screen time), but I do love to cook from scratch, garden, go for walks or bike rides, and chat with friends.
As the Miami Herald says, movement, real food, social connection and mindset are the pillars of a nonna lifestyle.
An older woman in white shirt and pants enjoys a walk along the beach
