When the going gets tough

Source: http://fitandfrugirl.blogspot.com

This is late February. It’s week six of our college’s fifteen-week January semester and about the time that collegiate confusion seems to intensify. Systems don’t work as they should. Students get frustrated because communications channels are crossed. Faculty members like myself find themselves feeling like they should have been designed as octopuses with enough arms to reach into and handle multiple tasks all at once. I’ve been teaching as a full-time pursuit since September 2006, and I feel as if this is the time of year when my nerves start to frazzle. My energy level dips, and my cynicism rises. Often, I find myself crashed out on the sofa, unable to formulate a coherent sentence. More often than not, my good health betrays me and I fall sick.
As if the goal were to prove the prognosis correct, I woke up Sunday morning with a sore arm, swollen throat, and sinuses so constricted that breathing actually hurt. My body was chilled, but my brain was resolute. I was going to use this Day of Rest productively: I was going to work. I was going to write. And I was going to work out. I was fine, I told myself. I slept a full eight hours. I had words to compose, papers to grade, miles on bike, in the swimming pool, and in my running shoes to log.
Five minutes into my resoutionary determination and my body slammed shut. My fingers relaxed their grip on the pen I was using to scrawl out my morning pages. My notebook out of the crook of my arm, and I fell back asleep. When I awoke some four hours later, it was close to Noon. My coffee was cold, and my husband was staring at me with a concerned look on his face.
My face broke into a smile.

“I slept,” I announced. “I really slept.”

The statement was an acknowledgement of triumph, not of mind over matter but of body over mind. Living in my head, I thought I had set the agenda for the day and had complete control over what was to transpire. The body had other ideas. It declared Sunday was going to be a day of rest.

I spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the sofa, sipping fluids to rehydrate myself, and just puttering around. It felt like I was wasting time, but in so many ways, it was time well worth wasted. Everything that seemed so important was put on hold, and once on hold, it didn’t seem quite that important.

The sun was out, so once we ascertained that I was not running a fever, my husband and I bundled up and went for a refreshing outdoor walk. After we returned, we made a comfort food dinner of onion soup topped with toasted bread and thick slabs of cheddar cheese, and had it with a squash from our stockpiles and fresh spinach from the farmer’s market. I hit the sack around 11 p.m. and refused to rise until 8:30. I spent the day grading assignments quietly at home, and as 4 p.m. approached, we decided to make our way to the Saratoga YMCA.

My goal in working out was not to work out. It was not to log too much but merely to move my body a little. I decided, as a result, that I would swim. I started with ten minutes of soaking in the whirlpool, enjoying the feel of hot water massaging out the kinks in my shoulders and neck. I then headed for the pool and climbed in carefully, fully intending to swim without any kind of stepped-up exertion. I came out of the water 45 minutes later refreshed and relaxed. We headed home and prepared another comfort food dinner featuring a sweet venison sausage, onions, and garlic wrapped with rice in cups of cabbage leaves and baked in some of our homemade tomato sauce. Still more kinks fell loose from my body. It’s now approaching 10:15 p.m. I am looking forward to another full night of sleep, and what I hope will be a relaxed start to the day.

Is there a motto to this story? Perhaps it’s simply this: When the going gets tough, let your body decide what’s going to get going. You don’t always have to be tough.

Prescription for procrastination

Before I get too deep into this tale, I probably should qualify: I’m neither a medical doctor nor a mental health counselor. In short, I don’t know if “prescription” is the best choice of word. But for the past couple of weeks, it has worked marvelously. It’s a smile.

Winter chills, short days, windy nights, drafty offices, and the state of being swaddled in multiple layers of clothing tend to lessen my motivation to move. The effects of winter are not just on my workouts but more significantly perhaps on my writing and perhaps even more significantly on the pace of my teaching and mentoring work at times of the year when student needs come at faculty in a variety of ways. For the past month, I have been helping students talk through their college study plans, select classes, prepare for graduate programs, learn how to access files in Google Docs, and to Tweet. I also have been writing learning contracts for independent studies ranging from the Irish diaspora experience to writing a fantasy fiction graphic novel. I also have been reading for all of my classes, for a weekly book discussion group, and for scholarship. I also have been writing, preparing and leading presentations, and will be reading my work in two days at two different events, within an hour of each other. This range of work is exciting, and energizing. But, coupled with the cold weather, the ever-growing to do list is starting to take its toll. Rather than attack it, I glare at it and play computer games as an act of senseless denial.

I discovered something about ten days ago, however. Once I have a committed myself to engaging in a short-term activity, the fatigue falls away. I settle into a rhythm and I find myself smiling. The cold chill that seems to be weighing my body down lifts. Even if I do not get as much done as my ambitious daily work plan had anticipated, what I do accomplish feels good. I go home with a lilt in my walk.

I’m not quite sure how I found this instant happiness. It sort of dawned on me one day that it was occurring. I decided to see if I could transform it into a conscious mental motivating activity. Rather than waiting for the smile to come to me in the first lap of my run, I would initiate the smile. And, rather than waiting until I was actually running, I would start smiling as soon as I swiped my membership card at the YMCA where I work out. I also tried it at work. Rather than futzing around with e-mail and looking at my snail-mail inbox while I thought of all the work that lay ahead of me for the day, I would immediately contemplate my first project and start smiling.

I will be honest; I didn’t knock off the procrastination entirely. But I reconfigured my understanding of it. It was no longer a delaying tactic; it was a warmup. And, as a warmup, the procrastination time seemed to get a lot shorter. I have been amazed by the effects.

Our scarcest commodity as humans is really not money. It is time. The realization that time is ticking away in my life grows sharper as I grow older. It has been especially acute since last November when I turned fifty-one. No, I am not going through a mid-life crisis. Rather, I think, I’m seizing a mid-life opportunity. If time is finite and desires of what one wants to do are infinite, there’s only two appropriate solutions: Cut out the unnecessary stuff and prioritize the rest.

Health counselors, motivational speakers, and personal development coaches have been preaching such things for decades, if not millennia. I have read plenty of books on the topic and attended a fair number of retreats and workshops where mental motivation, prioritization, and happiness are the cornerstone topics. But, perhaps, the value of this advice doesn’t sink in until one is ready to hear it. More and more, I find myself defining such things as entertainment: Is it a party? Dinner out? A movie? Sitting by the fire with my husband and cats nearby? Cooking a wholesome meal at home? Choosing a workout over a social engagement?

I remember confronting such choices a decade ago and worrying about whether I would evolve into an anti-social eccentric old lady, and if I would be able to live with myself. I remember worrying that others would look at me as a societal loser because I would spend nights at home, devote myself to training for races I would never actually be able to win, and opt for writing and growing my own food over joining a paddling crew with my friends.

A decade later, it seems that maybe I have become that eccentric individual. And it seems that indeed I can live with myself. It simply means quieting the noise around me, with my simple prescription. A smile.