Dragon: A Parable

Today, I intended to do something easy to start with. Maybe a few minutes of Wii Fit, maybe taking the stairs twice any time I went up or down them, that sort of thing.

But then our weekly snowstorm came in and boy does it look like a doozy, so I chose to get in some shoveling. This was made slightly more difficult by having one hell of a Charlie Horse in my left tricep when I woke up this morning - it was bad enough that I broke out into a sweat and felt slightly nauseous. I spent a couple of hours recovering, by which point we had about 2-3 inches of light powder on the ground. I took me about 45 minutes to get that off the previously-clear portions of the walkway, sidewalk, driveway, and my car. Not too bad, I only had to stop for a breather once or twice, but certainly enough to feel like I had performed physical activity. At this point that's what I'm looking for on my non-cardio days (my current scheme is cardio 3 days a week and some form of physical activity the other days - it's purposefully nebulous, I want to give various things a try and see how they feel during and afterward). I plan on doing more shoveling tomorrow as well (and if others beat me to it I might break out the Wii Fit), and have my first cardio day on Thursday (concept: do it Thursday and Saturday this week, then go to a M-W-F schedule).

My current idea on this is to be in walking-around shape by the time the snow melts. I want to want to do things like walk instead of take my car if I need to pick up something at the nearby Staples, or choose to head to a nearby park on foot on a nice day when I have some free time. Right now I'm so used to sitting all day that those things sound like work rather than play. So the first task is getting sufficiently used to moving around that doing so comes naturally. But if that takes more than a month, or two months or three, I won't be upset or disappointed. I'm trying to do this in a low-stress meandering fashion rather than a goal-oriented achievement-unlocked fashion, because I'm honestly curious if that will work better for me. I hope it will, because I've got enough stress in other areas of my life and stress reduction is a much higher priority than running a marathon or lifting my own body weight or whatnot. Put simply, being happy should come first, with the awareness that happy is not the same as pleasurable/pleasant and happy-later is just as important as happy-now. The way I feel at the end of a day with no physical activity is decided not happy; let's see how days with physical activity feel. . .

"Daily exercise" wins by a 2:1 margin (taking Facebook votes into account). Your doctors would be so proud ;P. So for February I will work on daily exercise, with updates here and in FB to keep me honest (please poke me if you don't see updates ;). In March I'll start on daily meditation.

BTW, I'm specifically avoiding combining the two. That is entirely the opposite principle from "take it one thing at a time", so it feels wrong to go that route. Also, that's my answer all the time and it clearly hasn't worked in the past so I want to do something different. I didn't say I was going with a "one at a time" concept on FB so it was more frequently suggested over there, but it showed up over here as well so I figured I'd clear that up :).

I want to pick a habit to get into my system during February. But I want to pick just one, and I've got two that are vying for first place: daily meditation, and daily exercise. They're both important to me, both are things I've tried and failed to habitualize in the past, both have a direct impact on my health, and both will serve to further current goals of mine. So I'm asking you, my gentle readers, to help me choose:

[Poll #1673167]

(it's not really a matter of vs., but I like the thought of the two in a ring duking it out ;P)

(I'm going to be making these posts daily, with LJ-cuts for the uninterested. The purpose is public accountability, so they will be set to "everyone".)

( strung that string )

I failed to keep up with habit-formation of playing the fiddle partially because one of the strings on the fiddle I'm using broke (the low G; snapping was preceded by failing to hold tune, which should have been a clue but it's been a while since I've played a real instrument). Today I bought a new set (ball end), figuring it was likely time to replace all of them. The only other instrument I've replaced the strings on is a guitar and that was at least a decade ago. I was intending on replacing them one string at a time, hoping that would keep me from needing to figure out how to place the bridge; I've also found this page and I think there's some tips in that Big Book of Fiddling I got for Christmas. There are fine tuners on all the strings. Is this something I can do on my own? If so, any beginner's tips? If not, any suggestions on who to get to do it/how to find such a person?

(The other part was failure to create effective triggers; I've some ideas on that front involving associating fiddle playing with walking in the door - if I can parse fiddling as relaxing from school/clinic it'll be so much easier ;)

I have to say, 6 Changes is pretty appealing to me - there are certainly some things I want to pick up and develop as daily habits. The biggest problem I can see with it for me is maintaining focus, since it's extremely slow-paced. But that's where things like triggers and public accountability (hi! ;) come in, so it should work.

The first habit I want to work on is playing the fiddle for at least half an hour every day. So starting next Monday I'm going to spend a week tuning my fiddle every day. Each week I'll move on to the next step: playing through a scale, playing through a song, playing through a song twice, playing through a song twice and another song once, playing for at least 15 minutes, playing for at least 20 minutes, playing for at least 30 minutes. Starting next Monday there will be daily status updates on these steps as they go. When I've made playing the fiddle a daily habit I'm going to reward myself by taking up fiddle lessons again (if I can afford them) and possibly looking for pub sessions to join in on.