How to Prepare to Be a Beginner.

 

Lately I have been pretty consistent about doing yoga in the mornings. Nothing crazy. I am not good enough at it yet to do anything crazy. I also don’t have any special knowledge about it. My qualifications start and end with the fact I own a yoga mat. 

I found a woman on Youtube who has a series of “easy” and “beginner” videos and I have been working my way through those in the mornings. They range between 15 and 30 minutes and she doesn’t come across as judge-y, which is weirdly common, I have discovered.

Now I’m not here to convince you to do yoga, but I do kind of wish that someone had convinced me to do yoga a long time ago. Here’s why:

• It is waaaaaaaay harder than you think it is. I used to be all like, “That just looks like bending”, but OMG, it engages muscles in a way I hadn’t previously understood. It’s like the first time I ever did a plank and ended up shouting, “Why is this so hard!”

• I’m not going to get all woo-woo on you, but I think it is possible that I’ve been calmer this week than I was a month or two ago. And that’s good because my work life has been … a lot this week, but I have felt it less. This might be a correlation, not causation thing, but I have started to just sort of feel better. And that’s good.

• It seems like my cat is getting a cold. I don’t think that is related to the yoga, though if there is some zen spirit energy swirling around my apartment now, who knows how that manifests?

• I’m sleeping marginally better this week. I’ve always had trouble sleeping, but I think I’m getting a little better at it.

• This isn’t initially going to sound like a good thing, but I go through my days with a little bit of that physically exerted feeling in my body. They way you feel when you’ve been going to the gym consistently. It isn’t a pleasant feeling exactly; some soreness in the arms and legs. It is a good feeling though. I imagine this is my muscles busy throughout the day trying to adjust to this new normal.

• I’ve also been using the elastic band thing and foam roller I had to get for physical therapy, except I figured out I can use them to do some light working out during the day. Again, nothing crazy, but sometime sit is nice to take a break from work and go do some reps on my stretchy band that hooks into the closet door. Do you even stretchy band, bro?

• None of these little things seem life changing. I’m not going to give up running or anything; it’s good to sweat and to run your body into the ground sometimes, but this may be the first time in my adult life that I have realized that not everything has to be that. I think that my brain thinks that nothing counts if you don’t end up a painful sweaty mess. Probably this is the fault of high school gym or being raised as a man in America. Not everything has to be dialed up to 11. Maybe slow and steady and consistent is good. As much as I love running, I’m not going to lie, most of the times I do not go out for a run it is because I just don’t have the juice for it. And who could blame me? When I DO go run, I do like 6 or 8 or 10 MILES! And some days I don’t have that in me. Most days I could go do a mile, but what fun is that?? The first mile is the worst part! But maybe it is good to do things that do not require ALL OF THE ENERGY in your body. Doing some light yoga in the morning isn’t going to change my life, but over time, might change my life, you know what I’m saying?

• If I do this yoga thing long enough, I might one day be comfortable enough to go to a beginners yoga class and then I’ll end up being all about green smoothies or something. So stay tuned for that!

• I really like doing the “Namaste” thing at the end of yoga. I don’t know why. It just seems gracious and we could all use a little more of that.

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The Butterfly Part.

 

Let us recap: Previously on this blog …

Since about February I have been trying to figure out how to construct a life. I’ve been trying things out. I’ve been looking for ways to protect my personal life and time from my job which is constantly trying to expand beyond its box. I’ve been testing out better sleep schedules. I’ve been testing out different diets, different foods, different ways to spend an evening. 

Because I moved here shortly before Quarantine dropped on all of us, I didn’t really much of a life to speak of when we went into lock down and I have realized — much to my horror — that as life begins to start up again, it means that I have to begin anew the work of building a life for myself. 

I’ve done this sort of work before, but usually it was because I was in grad school a couple of times and, say what you will about grad school, it comes with a built in cohort of people. This life doesn’t, not exactly. I’m blessed with a handful of great coworkers who are fun people to grab dinner and a drink with occasionally, but because they’re my coworkers I can’t just call them up and be like, “I’m lonely!”

I have a couple of friends in the Bay Area, but more than a hour away, so that limits our interactions.

So in the weird period where the world is open, but not fully up to speed yet, I’m concentrating on myself and what I can do to build up a life that I like, so that when I eventually have to go meet people and try to make friends and — god forbid — try to date, I will at least be a person who has his shit together and has something to offer.

With all of that in mind, I’ve been doing the basics: getting enough sleep, drinking enough water (never once paid any attention to this before like a month ago), I am more consistently doing yoga in the mornings, I’ve been scouting out new running trails, I’ve been trying to both clean up my diet and remove most meat from it (two things I have needed to do for awhile), I’m also going to cut back on the booze and try to dry out for a month or two. Red wine got me through Quarantine, and I will always appreciate that, but Quarantine has ended here in California and now I can’t justify the extra 600-800 calories in a bottle of Malbec. I’ll still grab drinks with people out in the world, but both meat and booze I’m just not going to bring into the apartment anymore (with the possible exception of tune, I’ve been eating a lot of tuna and rice lately).

I also purchased a scale recently because I was convinced I’d put on 20 pounds during the big Q. The reality is that I weigh about what I did when I moved here. I know I have lost muscle mass and put on flab, but my weight has about netted out, so that’s something. I figure that just by losing the wine, the pizza, and the potato chips I’m off to a good start. Add to that a cleaner diet that involves actually eating the fruit I buy, and now we are off to the races. On a day when my job does not eat my life, I can get in about half an hour of yoga in the mornings and I have scheduled time to run for about an hour in the early evening. In the latest interaction of my daily schedule I have built in time specific to writing, which I hadn’t really done before. If you add up all of these small changes I’ve been working on, you start to see how full on habits could emerge. That is the idea. I always get ambushed by life and work, so each time I try to make improvements, only a few end up sticking, but that’s why I keep trying; some of them do stick, it just takes time and effort.

Such is life.

One thing I have learned from earlier attempts is that if I can actually have one of these good days (yoga, clean food, a reasonable work day, running, writing, reading) I actually sleep better (I toss and turn a lot lately) and when I sleep better, I wake up feeling better, which makes it easier to have a good day, and a good day means I sleep better, which means it is easier to have another good day, and on and on and on … but that cycle is somewhat difficult to get into to, but I’m trying to get back into it.

When I feel bad about my failures in these efforts, I find some grace in reminding myself that everyone in the world has endured a terrible trauma over the last year and a half (and in some places that trauma still endures) and so we can’t really judge this new life we’re entering into the same way we might have judged our previous lives. In some ways the fact that I have to build a new life from scratch here in this place is actually kind of thematically fitting. I did the chrysalis of Quarantine here, I just need to now figure out how to do the butterfly part.

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Be Best.

Yesterday when I posted I was feeling pretty down about my own lack of follow through when it came to building a more effective and productive life. I should mention that I am not one of those self-help-book-reading people who wants to maximize their output and vibrate into some sort of astral projected new plane of productivity. In fact, I tend not to like those people. All I’m looking to do here is be better. Be best.

The work of a life is never done until — you know — one day it suddenly is, and with great finality. Until then though, I think it is important that we should make efforts to build lives that we can both enjoy and be proud of.  That is a weirdly tall order. Both ENJOY and be PROUD of. We live in a society that requires us to have these jobs that consume so much of us, that exhaust us so, that most of us, all we have the bandwidth to do after them is eat crappy food and watch TV. If you’re lucky maybe you find love (or a close enough facsimile). Maybe you have kids and in them can find both joy and pride. So much of ourselves though we are forced to abandon along the side of the road of life. Some people make it work, I guess, squeeze their passions into “side hustles” or something like that. Or convince themselves that what brings them joy are actually childish things that must be put away.

None of this seems great.

It is almost as though we live in a system that prizes capital over people …

Zoom out from our own lives to everyone’s lives. What would a world look like if it wasn’t organized this way? What would a world look like if it was organized around people and not profit? I’m not trying to be a dorm room Marxist here. This is something I think about a lot. 

It probably would be a world with fewer cars and televisions, but a shitload more public access television shows. But who builds the cameras and the who strings the cables that move around the electricity to power those cameras? Who works at the power plant that makes the electricity? I’m sure there are probably people out there whose passion is running a nuclear reactor, but probably not enough of them to make this all work.

There is a fallacy that we have to choose between an electricity-less, pre-modern world or the one that we have now. As if those are the only two options. Discussions like this usually degenerate into those kind of blunt abstractions. 

Often I like to think on a world like ours, but better. We can keep our electricity, but it is solar and wind now. And yes, someone still has to run the power lines, but it is a hard job, so maybe they don’t have to work as much. Maybe we can just all agree to 20 hour work weeks instead of 40 hour work weeks. Or, as is the reality for so many people, 50, 60, 70 hour work weeks. I believe it really is possible to construct a way of life that cares about people and so reduces the size of our capital-focused activities. I believe we really can create a mode of socially organized life where working for a wage is only one of many parts of our lives. That society would have to be structured a little differently than ours and it would likely result in a world that physically looks a little different than ours (higher density housing, fewer cars, more communal spaces, community gardens, etc.). It would be a world where you can’t necessarily get a banana 12 months out of the year, but it would also be a world where Jeff Bezos doesn’t buy a second yacht to follow around his first yacht because the first yacht doesn’t have a place to land his helicopter. 

I’ve been thinking lately about the phrase, “From each based on ability, to each based on need” and even now, all these years after I first read it, I still think it is one of the most beautiful ideas I have ever heard of. I think we can nudge our lives closer to that idea. 

It would have to start with nudging one another. It would have to start by spreading the word a little, which is what I am doing here (to all of my non-existent readers).

This post was not supposed to unspool into my own take on post-late-capitalist utopianism. All I had planned to do was tell you that after feeling down about my life yesterday morning, I worked on getting my shit together a little. I worked hard at work. I ate clean all day. After work I went running even though it was cold (I ran a 10k and my time was TERRIBLE!) and then I made a simple dinner and then I read a book for a while and then I went to bed on time. Yesterday was one of my (treasured, but hard to pull off) RWR days, where I ran, wrote, and read all in one day.

I worked at making my own life a little better yesterday and I will try to do the same thing today. Living a good day is like adding a dash of hope to the next day. So this morning I have a little more hope than I did yesterday morning. Maybe that’s why I’m thinking on a world that is better. 

I hope your day is better today and I hope it makes your life a little better.

Be better.

Be best.

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