Last week I decided to make a change to my habits, in favor of my long-term health. Starting on Monday, I limited my lunch to 30 minutes and followed my lunch with a walk around the perimeter of the campus. I put on my special sneakers and had flashbacks to my temping days in the early ’90s, when the downtown lunch crowd of professional women wore sneakers with their suits and got their steps in at lunchtime — decades before anyone was trying to “get their steps.”
Walking around the campus takes me almost exactly 3,000 steps and 30 minutes. That walk combined with my usual daily amount of walking, plus a couple of other trips across and off campus, for over 13,000 steps. On Monday night I took a precautionary hot soaking bath with mineral salts, to help increase the odds of my being able to move on Tuesday. Tuesday’s walk wasn’t easy, but Wednesday’s was better. By the end of the week, my feet and legs had mostly adjusted to the new demands I was placing upon them. On Friday I started thinking, if I cut across campus and back I’d get a different workout from going over the drumlins….
But maybe that’s something I can do in the summer. Right now, as the spring term is coming to an end, consistency will be a comfort. I’d also like to avoid increasing the degree of difficulty to the point where I have to back off for a while before starting over.
On rainy days, I can switch to light strength training as I rearrange the department’s stash of novels and textbooks that have been left behind by retired instructors over the last several years. Lately I’ve been organizing the books into themed mini-libraries — one for first-year composition, one for literature and creative writing, and another for linguistics and second language acquisition. If nothing else, it allows us to see what resources we have as a department. And I get stronger by carrying books around or pushing shelves of them back and forth on carts; textbooks are rarely light reading (or carrying). Between library setup sessions I can take the stairs up and down for leg work.
The rest of the time, my work has me sitting in front of a computer most of the day and using my mind to remember procedures, learn new software, locate forms, answer student questions, research departmental data, and maintain my living campus network of Who Might Know The Answer To This. If I don’t get out of my seat for the occasional walkaround, I might get sucked, Tron-like, into the computer. I don’t think the games we’d play in the context of an enrollment database would be as thrilling as racing light cycles, but you never know.
I’ve also been trying to make some small dietary changes — basically drinking more water, and drinking and eating half my usual amount of everything else. So far, the results have been good; I think this is one of the efforts that will be easier to do, the longer I just do it and keep doing it. If I don’t make it too hard for myself, that is.
Another positive thing that I’ve been doing for myself is reading every day. I have some shorter daily readings, and I’ve acquired a pair of compilations of themed detective fiction, but I’ve also started on a rather long, dense, serious book that was edited and translated by one of the instructors in my department. After a week of reading, I have just finished the first part of the first chapter. The only way I got that far was to allow myself read as much as I could during my pre-work reading time without worrying about getting to the end of a section. Sometimes that’s only ten or fifteen minutes, depending on the length of the other passage I read in the morning. The book itself is a compelling story of a piece of history about which I know almost nothing — China’s Great Famine — and the subject matter is utterly heartbreaking. I have not calculated how long it might take me to finish the book, but the point is really to read and reflect on it. So I think that, for a change, I won’t calculate it at all. I’ll get there when I get there, and after that point I will be able to read a second book (on the Cultural Revolution) by the same author. I’m glad to be learning more history and also getting to appreciate more of the talents of my department members.
Knitwise I’m essentially in the same spot. I made a few rows of progress on the at-work project while watching a couple of training videos last week, but until I exhaust the first skein of yarn it won’t really look as if I’ve gotten anywhere with it. On the other hand — it’s a scarf. I won’t be done with it until the weather requires scarves again. Today’s high was 82 degrees and we’re looking forward to an overnight thunderstorm, so no one is crying because I haven’t finished this scarf yet. I’ll get there when I get there — I don’t need to create stress for myself by worrying about my knitting projects. The knitting will always be there to help me stay grounded and feel secure when so many other things are in transition. Writing will do that for me, too; stay tuned.
Chocolate Sheep 