bad. ass.

I am capable of being something of a physical badass. Everyone, in my belief, is capable of this. I’ve lived in a way – really, starting at least as a teenager – that reminds me of this all the time, meaning my life is pretty much awesome.

I haven’t lived this way so much in the past few months, though. Got hurt (not badly, but enough that I didn’t recover so fast) and had been off some of my physical habits before that. So I stalled. It’s been so long that I started worrying that I might permanently convert to physically unadventurous schlepitude. Not knocking schleps-by-choice.

Here I am soaking in my own sweat for the 3rd-ish time this week. So. Not permanent! Yay!

I occasionally get asked how to motivate to go to the gym, dance, work out, move, etc. It may be a shock, but I have no advice on this subject. I need to use my body, or I feel slow and unfulfilled. Like, seriously, I think more slowly and less interestingly, am lonelier and more sad and more angry and just generally unable to process stuff that happens.

Anyhow. There is little I can do from that perspective to get myself moving again. I have to sleep and watch television and remember other perspectives. But! As long as I am in any other perspective, physical effort is an intense and irresistible pull. I have no “gosh, if only I could drag myself to the gym” mode. Either I must or I won’t.

Now I’m back to normal (the must-do perspective), and I feel so good. I lost a fair amount of skill and coordination, but seem to have picked up some unnoticed endurance. This doesn’t directly relate to most of what I write here – but then, it does.

we must destroy in order to rebuild

The past few days I’ve drifted away from my path here. I had a cheeseburger for dinner. I was in an accident over the weekend, and I haven’t eaten more than half of anything in front of me since Saturday night. Until the cheeseburger.

The whole accident thing left me with sensory overwhelm. Getting into the garden soothes that. So. I planted lavender, nasu, more tomatoes, squash, cucumber, rhubarb, and a ton of climbing flower seeds. And hung a bird feeder (which is doing wonders at keeping the birds from nomming my tasty plantlets).

I am sadly going to have to replace my car – though at least I contemplated life without one, it’s actually impossible to get to work from my house via public transit. Who builds an office complex completely off the transit grid? We do, apparently.

It’s a consolation, then, that if all these things grow I could skip buying any produce but berries this summer. It’s been so long since I ate a cherry tomato hot off a plant in my own yard.

I have some other livelihood stuff in mind to talk about, but first I need to hang with this whole post-accident feeling.

things i can live without

I told a few of my fellow coaches at training this past weekend about my dream of this different life. It felt like they wouldn’t disapprove. Beautiful thing about coaches: they want people to be happy and fulfilled. They’ll support any way you choose to do that.

In practice coaching, I committed to someone to write a list – two lists, actually – of things I can live without and things I can’t sacrifice.

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show me near!

Today’s small accomplishment: putting a recyclables basket in my upstairs bathroom. Reminds me to separate the renewable from the landfillable, even when the kitchen is so far away.

Today’s fail: being too sick to notice the Ukrops guy wrapping my stuff in plastic bags before putting it in my canvas ones.