Week 2: Just in under the wire...

So--I never planned necessarily to blog every day. I hoped for at least once/week and ideally many times more/week. But, life, perfection being the enemy of the good, and other assorted Mental Clutter got in the way. So, we move forward. And try to get this one in under the wire of Day 14 [i.e. on 8/30/09] so that Week 2 has something.

I'm going to post, then edit, just to make that happen. Cheating, you say? An elegant solution, I say.

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OK, I'm back. And I'm noticing that b/c I saved some notes as a draft on 8/18, it looks like this was posted then. Crap.

Oh well, onward and upward.

I wonder if, after Julie and Julia, it is possible for any blogger to be (anachronism alert) typing a post, and not, on some level, think of herself as Amy Adams, the eye of the camera watching as she considers, continues, and finally, hits "publish"?

Of the hopes in and advice-to-self in my previous post:

"Never regret, always learn": kinda getting into this. It's simmering, marinating. It's helping, a bit.

"Eat only food that I enjoy". This has been somewhat of a revelation--interrupting the eating of what's handy and making just the tiniest bit of greater effort to get something I actually want. It's so ridiculously true that introducing consciousness and a moment of choice into the many small acts of daily life--even if the net choice isn't always different--changes things. It really does.

"Bed by 11:00 pm". Dismal failure. But having articulated it, I'm in relationship to the goal, always ready to be drawn back (even though there's no "back" to start with) like a rubber band, needing to relearn my bounciness but knowing it's possible.

"Drink a lot of water...". Uneven, but better. Bought a big water bottle, and a nifty, slim, front-to-back holder of five bottles for the fridge, from the Container Store (my place-of-worship away from home)--the idea being, it's there, you grab, you go. Finally got it all out of the car and into the house--and even filled the bottles with water. They sit there chilling, waiting to be grabbed.

My friend Lucy wrote to me on Facebook: "Have you checked out the Happiness Project?...Find the Starter Kit for HP groups; it has a lot about this kind of thing, providing a structure for making resolutions that work, personal 'commandments', this kind of stuff." A good jumping off point for me to say something about what this is blog is not.

At this point, I don't have any intention of setting up some formal resolutions or goals and seeing how I stick to them over time. No systematic promises here, just the doable-seeming thoughts that come to me and seem worth trying to pursue now, based on living 48 years (and change) in my skin. There are lots of Big Things that I want to work on, and many of them won't ever find their way here in any systematic way, b/c experience tells me that that is a recipe for, among other things, flight and failure.

Also, against popular wisdom, I will probably name here many things that I'm trying to change. "Don't beat yourself up, eat better, sleep more, and drink enough, and that's only the beginning? Are you crazy, woman?" you may want to ask me. The beginning of my answer is this: It's my firm belief that, simultaneous with working on bigger stuff that takes more time and more work, that feels more private, that is higher stakes, there is actually quite a bit of low-hanging fruit that, even if I can't pick it all at its peak, eat tons of it and make jam out of the rest, I can still take some delicious and--here's where the metaphor breaks down--instructive bites of. Low-hanging fruit that will bear fruit. Small things that I've been thinking about or mulling over below the surface for a while, for which naming them out loud, here on the intertubes, might be a tipping point, if not the tipping point.

In general, I'm learning that less is more, in many many ways. And yet, here, there is a way in which--right now, and within reason--I'm tending towards more is more. We'll see how that goes.

Tonight's fruit:

Slow down gradually at intersections. Make sure I have enough room to do so behind other cars when there is traffic. Stop before the crosswalk at a stop sign. In general, realize the ways I'm rushing when I drive that don't get me there any faster but make things feel more rushed--and potentially less safe.

Arrive places early. Part of the whole thing I learned from a friend who's trying to eat healthier--instead of focusing on what she should eat less of, concentrating on what she wanted to eat more of, figuring that if she eats more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, at least some of the "less of"s will take care of themselves. So, instead of "Don't be late!", remember how nice it feels to have two minutes before I need to get out of my car, to be able to gather up my stuff and walk in slowly and feel calm even though I need to be somewhere. In general, embrace what there is for me in doing something in a given moment against type, instead of what I have to give up or stop doing.

And now, I am going to embrace some water and a pillow, and call it a night.

Neither Julie and Julia, nor Spice and Spirit

Every time I am approaching a birthday, I think about the goals I'd love to achieve, first by the birthday, and then--when it passes without achieving so much as an extra load of laundry folded--by the next one.

This year, my husband turned 50. And it occurred to me that that meant that in two years, I'd be 50 too. I--who feel (cliche/triteness alert) like I'm just a couple of years out of college, who remembers what it was like in grad school when the woman cashing my check asked, "Are you an undergraduate?" and I felt like, "Hello, I'm 30, I've earned these years!"--am approaching 50. As in, even with good luck and good health, we can assume that my life is more than half over. Gulp.

But right now, I don't care about how much is left. I just want to make sure I'm not letting the years I've got pass by without so much as a major issue tackled, a long-dreamed-of mini-adventure unpursued...or, on a smaller scale, a NIA class unexplored or a bad eating habit unexamined.

When I mentioned on Facebook, the new public square, that I was contemplating some kind of "100 weeks" project for the two years leading up to my 50th birthday (I figured, 50 weeks a year with two weeks for vacation), I got some modest encouragement. A friend jokingly suggested I cook my way through the Lubavitcher kosher cookbook, Spice and Spirit. (I did love Julie and Julia in both book and movie form, but I wasn't looking for a random yet pleasurable project to give my life meaning. I was looking for a chance to slowly shape--and even reshape--my life by taking care of what's already, at least in theory, on my plate.)

So, here's the scoop. I'll be recording here things I want to work on (not all of them, but some of them; some will as usual be between me and my therapist, others between me and my imaginary journal--kind of like an imaginary friend, but without the funny name and the place at the dinner table) as they occur to me. As both my mother and my boss (hi Jon!) will probably be reading this, there won't be TMI, or at least, not too much TMI. And I'll be talking about how the work is going, if at all, and how I feel about that. 

I warn you--some of this might be just a little too prosaic. (Fancy talk for "boring".)

I promise nothing systematic, although there may be some of that. I promise not to lie, though I don't promise to tell the whole truth. I promise to publicly be a person in progress. For now, that's about it.

For starters, the things I'm thinking about tonight go something like this:

Never regret, always learn. (Wish I could come up with a catchy acronym for that.)

Eat only food that I enjoy. (That means, if it's not what I want, put it down and find something I do actually want, even if it requires the carbon footprint of a Yeti.)

Bed by 11:00 pm. (Whoops--please ignore the time this is posted.)

Drink a lot of water--seltzer, lemon-enhanced, whatever, but hydrate.

That's enough for one night.