Sprang Break

I went on a shopping trip with my mom and sister that lasted almost two days. It was good to spend time with them, but a lot of it was me trying on every pair of pants in the whole store and grunting in frustration. I also noticed that in all those in-between moments spent waiting in the checkout line, walking to the car, driving to the next store, we were venting our self-loathing mental noise about needing to lose x pounds, feeling like our bodies are not the right shape for this or that, or in my mom's case, feeling too old to wear this or that. Basically we spent a lot of energy thinking and talking about our perceptions of our bodies and the way we categorize ourselves and impose rules accordingly. For instance, mom "can't" wear any shirt fitted to her waist, and I "can't" wear short shorts or skirts. Or most pants. And we weren't talking about this in an analytical way, either. These are things we believe about ourselves without question. At the end of the day, we all felt not-good-enough and what we perceive to be our physical flaws were on our minds. But at least we went to a yoga class together on Monday. That seemed to help clear a lot of the mental noise. By the end of Tuesday, I ended up finding pants, so the good news is that I don't need to go shopping again for a while.

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I never knew that carpe diem was part of a longer phrase: Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero – "Seize the Day, putting as little trust as possible in the future." I was reading this just now.

I often mention to my students, when they're freaking out about being successful, that the future doesn't actually exist. All they hear about from adults is that they needs to be thinking about their futures and "one day when you're in college, you're going to need to know this." I'm guilty of telling them this, too, because I try set my class on a college preparatory track. It always seems like a good, scary motivation, too: if you don't learn this right this second, you'll never be ready for college! You're gonna FAIL. I'll do anything to get their attention.

Though I truly believe that there is no future and that living with a specific one in mind is often crippling (such as imagining, when you're a kid, that you'll get married in a big white dress and that's what being an adult is), I'm guilty of having tons of anxiety about the idea of even the most immediate future. Lately I've been letting my research paper workload get to me. I've been slowly and steadily working through it: I have 50 papers left out of 160. I've been working on them for over a month. But I let the anxiety of what if I don't finish get to me to the point where I do the old song and dance of procrastinating for days, then doing a few, then feeling like it's not enough, then procrastinating some more because it makes me uncomfortable to face how many there are.

I thought yesterday: what if I just quit doing that? I went to yoga class twice this week, and I haven't been in at least six months. Maybe a year. Besides the fact that it makes my ass really sore, I now see what a mental impact yoga has on me. Yesterday in class, I was working on don't think; just do. I was thinking about what "spirituality" really means, and I think that's a big part of it. I don't believe in "the supernatural," like god or ghosts or astrology or fortune telling or ESP. But I believe that there is a mental experience of being, a physical experience of being, and then something else. There are so many parts of our bodies besides our conscious thinking patterns--there are ways to be aware of being alive or acting on sensory input that are not purely mental thought processes, I'd argue. Such as "feeling" that something is working out or not. Something closer to intuition, I guess.

In those Myers Briggs tests, I always score as a "thinker" instead of a "feeler" and a "sensor" instead of "one who intuits." People I know tend to make the comment that I am an extremely concrete interpreter as opposed to someone who thinks in abstract concepts. Sometimes this is a good thing--I'm pretty decent at looking at an emotional "problem" and coming up with concrete solutions. Or when I write a story, my style is plain and straightforward. The bad part is that I tend to think my way out of doing uncomfortable things. I can rationalize or just plain excuse myself from life. A small example is that in yoga, when we are about to do a pose, I'll think I can't do that and excuse myself from it instead of blindly going for it and finding out whether I can do it or not. Or I can only hold it for x seconds instead of holding it for however long she says to and noticing the degree of discomfort my body feels instead of avoiding it. If I try to just do it without thinking, I end up pushing much further. Running is a similar experience. Now that I consciously know that I can run two miles without stopping, I can use my concrete thinking to hold myself to that. Before, when I was working up to that, I had no idea how far I could go, and on the days that I would just run without thinking too hard about it, I was able to hit a kind of autopilot flow that enabled me to sustain the run. It's been a while since I've employed that state of mind, because I haven't tried to push myself past two miles.

I've pleased to say that according to the little exercise log I keep in google calendar, in the past 10 days I've run 5 times, walked once, and gone to two yoga classes.

I ended up contacting my old writing teacher and she hooked me up with this girl who does a semi-monthly "literary salon" at her house. She used to work at Honeymoon Bungalow. I contacted her and facebook friended her, and she was really sweet. So I'm going to that on May 28th. I'm going to use that date to throw some writing together. The other part of the plan is to get to meet some more people who want to nerd out about writing with me. I feel rusty, but better already about getting back into the groove of semi-regular writing.