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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To Breakfast Margaritas.

 

So it has been a few days. I told you I was going to have a rough week and let me tell you, a rough week was had.

But I have (so far) survived and now it is Friday and my day should be fairly unexceptional today and that is all I am hoping for.

I should be able to start transitioning back to my normal/better schedule; doing things like this in the morning, working only a 8-hour day, then running and cooking real food in the evening. I’ll need to spend some time really re-tying to devise a way to insulate my life from the invasion of my work life into my personal life. It simply is not acceptable that this keeps happening. I took the job I have for several reasons, but one was specifically because I thought it would fit into a 40 hour week and that has not turned out to be the case. So I may have to reassess some things.

That being said, I don’t mean to sound like I’m bitching. I recognize that I still have it much easier than lots of people out there in the world, but I also am acknowledging that I have some responsibilities to myself here too. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I’d like to live a life with a baseline somewhere around or slightly above the median quality.” No one is ever going to put that on a t-shirt, nor should they.

How though, do we determine what we do want?

I suppose the answer to that is probably quite easy: we want what we want. You know what you want because it is simply the thing that you want.

That isn’t an entirely satisfying answer though. I mean, it is 7:22 in the morning and what I actually WANT is to be sitting at the roulette table at the El Cortez in Downtown Las Vegas, drinking a breakfast margarita and flirting with the working girls, but I recognize that is not the basis for a good and fulfilling life. So sometimes you can’t really trust what you want. Or at least you can’t trust what that will get you.

Look, I know that in this little blog post this morning I’m not going to come up with a workable framework for determining what constitutes a life worth living, but I suspect this is an iterative process and that the repetition is what makes the progress happen.

So I’ll see you tomorrow.

(Probably not though because tomorrow is Saturday and I don’t usually blog on Saturday, so I will see you Monday. Unless I do somehow end up at the El Cortez by then.)

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Hot Turkey, William Faulkner, and the One Big Project.

Here is the new way I have come up with to justify to myself the fact that I am still sort of a C student when it comes to improving my life: rather than going cold turkey on how I had been living and going hot turkey on this new lifestyle, what I should have done was PHASE IN the changes. “Phase in” means that I should have done it over time, I should have spread it out. How did I not think of that? It is only LITERALLY what any article about changing habits says!

I’ve been doing a pretty good job. I do some small creative stuff (like this) in the mornings just for me, and I have been running almost every day and I have been very good about sticking with my healthified new diet (by “diet”  I mean “new eating regiment” as opposed to “diet” as a thing one does for a while to lose weight) and I have been reading and writing in the evenings rather than listening to podcasts and endlessly scrolling Twitter.

Where I have been failing is in the mornings, but we have talked about my shoulder and how stiff and sore it is in the mornings, so I have not been consistent about doing my morning yoga. The other way I’m failing is with my writing in the evenings. I’m kind of just tinkering. I honestly don’t have the ONE BIG PROJECT right now, so each night I’m kind of just playing around. And that is okay, because the important thing about writing that people aren’t told enough is that the most significant part of any writing practice is to put your butt in the seat everyday. The writing flows from that act, not the other way around. There’s a famous quote usually attributed to Faulkner that goes, “I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”

That’s kind of what I’m doing in the evenings. I’m trying to rebuild that part of my writing practice. I’ve had a weird last few years — and while weird is not always bad — they have decimated my writing practice. There are a lot of reasons for this and we will no doubt get into them at some point, but for now, I’m doing a kind of writer’s physical therapy after a car accident and I’m metaphorically learning to walk again.  

So if you need me any evening, I’ll be sitting right here from 7:30 to 9pm, relearning how to place one foot in front of the other and remembering who I am and what I do.

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