Tag Archives: writing

Doing the work

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Doing the work

I’m helping my daughter study for her upcoming midterms and am reminded of how much we all want to be great at what we do, but sometimes hate the work and effort required to actually get where we want to go.

 

Work Progress Administration, 1930's

Having just sent her back to her room for the third time (and counting) to study some more for her English test, I’m feeling a bit like an awful ogre, but ultimately feel in the right to demand nothing less than 100% competency.  Her teacher may well throw her some curves, but I want her walking in there prepared and confident for the challenges.

 

The point is to not cheat at solitaire.

Saying one is doing the work when it actually isn’t getting done only serves to hurt oneself.  Goodness knows I’ve done my share of it, but watching my young one struggle with it is still a painful exercise — for both of us.  Her for needing to do it over and over until she figures out that doing the work in the first case will lessen the burdens later on and me for having to play the role of the brick wall.  Oh well.  She’ll figure it out — I just hope it’s sooner rather than later ’cause I want some ice cream too.

Sixth day

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Sixth day

 

The Sixth Day of Creation, 1926 Woodcut, M. C. Escher

 

This is my sixth morning of yoga and I’m thinking am I nuts to get up even earlier than way before dawn to do this??

Sure that meditation-y feeling is nice and it really is quite amazing to think that the body can hit such poses when one is fighting off dreamland but please, I need several more hours in the day just to do this sort of stuff because I actually do *not* think that sleep is overrated!

So I start thinking of it this way.

Did I really need to watch two episodes of Battlestar Gallactica (Season 1 of the reboot from the SF channel-really good) when I came home from work yesterday?  Yes, I acknowledge that I didn’t exactly “watch” per se, but made dinner for my family, removed all the ornaments from the Christmas Tree, took down the lights and packed everything.  So that’s “fair,” right?  So why do I feel “bad” about it?  Why do I insert the “but,” the — but I could have been doing yoga, shadow boxing, lifting weights, reading, paying bills, doing laundry.

Oy!  Balance!  What’s a person to do?

As with a lot of people I know there is way too much going on from day to day: a full day’s work, the business side of one’s domestic life, family time — not to mention attempting to keep oneself in some sort of physical “shape,” plus whatever other stuff is out there for one’s own personal growth.  Say taking classes, writing, gym time, running/walking/hiking/biking, doing pottery, painting, reading … and so on.

It all brings me to the notion that many of us live in a sort of permanent sixth day.

We wake-up much too early, go about creating the world, get to bed much too late and rather than taking a day of rest, get up for yet another day of creating the world.

It brings to mind that we are all like Atlas.  We are over-scheduled, over-stressed and over-worked — not in and of itself a “bad” thing so much as the fact that we are all so tired and need a space to slow it down; the chance to say, the seventh day is not a bad idea after all.  And no it doesn’t mean that one has to get “religion”  and go running off to a house of worship, rather, it’s a way to acknowledge that when one is working hard, very hard for that matter, it is A-OKAY to be a slug for a day.  Further, how one structures that seventh day is really, ultimately up to oneself.

For religious Jews, the seventh day is a weekly holiday.  One eats a huge meal with family, sings, dances, prays, and then sits around till the end of the sabbath period.  I’m oversimplifying, but the kernel of the idea is that we all owe ourselves some rest, if nothing else than to be restored enough to fight the next battle with our wits about us.

It’s a lesson that true athletes know.  The body can only be pushed so far before it needs rest.  And so with all of us as an everyday experience.  We need balance and part of that balance is closing the shutters and putting up the sign that says, “gone fishing.”

 

Alarm clocks and the bell

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Alarm clocks and the bell

I’ve been hit by the iPhone alarm clock bug.  Yep, my trusty morning wake-up call pooped-out of me this morning — and so my morning is already 45 minutes late.

As someone who loves boxing, I am otherwise bound by life in three-minute intervals: the boxing clock.  The typical timer has three flavors.  Green, yellow and red.  Green is lit-up for two and a half minutes before it dings and turns yellow for a further thirty-seconds.  The next bell is usually a fairly loud racket that signifies the turn to red and a sixty-second rest period.

At the gym yesterday, I used the “yellow” period to quicken up my pace as I trained.  My training consisted of nine rounds on the double-ended bag and a further three rounds on the speed bag before starting the abs torture.  This is not a typical training session, but that’s the beauty of a Sunday, it gives me a chance to challenge myself on different aspects of boxing.

Yesterday was all about lefts and upper-cuts as three-minute exercises.  First lefts, then left-left-right combinations, followed by left-left upper cut combinations and finally, right-left, right-left, right-left uppercuts finishing with the left jab off the left uppercut.

When I train throwing nothing but lefts for some part of the boxing clock or the entire three minutes, I hear trainers in my head talking about how such and such a fighter won a 12-round fight with nothing but lefts.  Hyperbole aside (although I swear someone did do that), challenging oneself to the equivalent of nothing but lefts as a timed exercise has a lot of benefits.  I used to do it as a writing exercise, setting an egg-timer for five minutes and writing down whatever entered my head without letting the pen off the page.

Yesterday’s workout was a variation on that.  Working on speed, agility and most importantly stamina.  By my last three speed-bag rounds I was pretty much “done,” however, I did try to use the last thirty seconds of each round to pound away without stopping on my alternating left hand and right hand 8-count, 4-count, 2-count, 1-1-1-1, speed-bag rhythm.   I was mostly successful and did feel that I earned the latte treat from Starbucks afterwards.

I’ll never get back the 45 minutes I lost this morning — that’s 15 rounds of boxing or nine timed writing sessions.  Oh well.  There’s always tomorrow.

Are we ever really done?

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Are we ever really done?

My semester ended yesterday.  I finished it with a self-satisfied feeling of having completed something.  Last night, in a celebration of sorts, I used my free evening time to bask in the glory of evening television, hanging (and arguing) with my family, cooking dinner (well, sort of, because it meant ordering in Indian for my husband, cooking mac and cheese with peas for my daughter and reheating Tuesday’s eggplant parm for me), wrestling with our very ornery cat and starting in on the list of chores in the run-up to Christmas.

I actually wrote Christmas cards, ordered Christmas presents online (including a double of something — oops), hauled out last year’s wrapping paper, talked with my husband about how neither of us felt very Christmasy this year, and then dug through our very overstuffed closet to find the bag of ornaments for the tree we have to get one of these days.  It all got me to thinking that the crush of too much to do all the time means that simple moments tend to fall by the wayside in favor of a forced march of “have-to-get-this-done.”

In essence, my night off wasn’t a night off at all, least ways not until I figured out that I really didn’t have to get everything done in one night.  And even though my list of things to do is still pretty huge, I’ve resolved to slow down over these next few weeks; to take the moments as they are and enjoy the journey too, not just the destination.

I see the application to my boxing too.  I get in a rush and go mad for the gym and then find that I lose the knack for even getting there.  So I’m calling a moratorium on needing to overachieve everything.  Merely achieving is okay, just as being done is okay.  That means that today, even though I have a lot of chores, I’m going to give each thing its due and if something doesn’t get finished, well, that’s okay too.  It can have its own arc; its own round, and while it’s nice to fit things neatly into the equivalent of three-minute intervals, not everything in life can be experienced in that way.

 

 

I want to live

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I want to live

A dear young friend of Girlboxing has been diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer.  Barely 30 she is facing the kinds of challenges and life or death decisions that no one should ever have to face, never mind a person as vital and full of life as she.

It reminds me that all of us face deeply troubling and difficult problems that can be as debilitating emotionally as they are physically or quite frankly, the other way around, wherein feeling crippled by loss or depression can lead to a physical manifestation of suffering.

Cure alls for these sorts of troubles are near-on impossible, but there are ways of coping that can help find a place for laughter and smiles along side the hugely daunting task of getting through a difficult time.

So of course you know where I’m going with this in the sense of “working it out on the bag,” but more so, finding the “daily something,” the space that’s yours and yours alone can be a source of inspiration and hope to keep you going.

My Aunt was just such a person.  She had every serious and debilitating disease one can have including four different cancers (one breast each and two lung cancers), two heart attacks, three strokes and kidneys that managed to function despite no registry on her blood tests, oh and the diabetes she managed to “cure” through changes to her diet.

Her philosophy for coping was simple.  She’d wake up everyday and tell herself “I want to live.”   This became her mantra:  “I want to live.”  She said this often and always, and most particularly to her doctors who got to thinking that she must have inherited the spirit of several cat colonies because she kept using up lives and coming back.

With each new diagnosis, she’d yell it louder:  “I want to live.”   And the same with each day after radiation treatments, chemo treatments, blood transfusions, midnight schleps to the hospital, or day-long waits in the ER.  “I want to live,” she’d call me and say as we worked through the choices she had to face – all the while never missing a hair appointment or her weekly manicure.  And taking care of those details, walking into her doctor’s as decked out as she could muster gave her something to twinkle about – and that made it infectious.  Her doctors took on her mantra saying, “She wants to live,” thus rallying around her and giving it their best to ensure that she’d have that chance.

When she did finally pass I felt a deep and abiding sadness, but knowing that she had pushed herself to the limit of what her body could take and then some gave me a peaceful sense that she was ready to be where she needed to be.  I also understood that her “daily something” was her effort to stay alive; to give herself the energy and pluck to fight each and every round to its fullest.

As well, I know that we all have that in us.  It’s just a matter of finding that one space that helps us work things through no matter if it’s a potter’s wheel a double-ended bag or a simple one line statement.  So whatever it is: writing a journal entry, walking a mile, learning something new or throwing nothing but lefts at a punching bag getting ready for the Golden Gloves; while your daily something won’t cure you, it sure will help to see you through.

 

Unfolding the bones

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Unfolding the bones

I’m at the age where missing a day at the gym, never mind a week or two really hurts.  This weekend was a case in point.  I had a paper due (today) and aside from a couple of walks in the cold and some crunches, I was pretty much attached to my laptop.  And yeah, it feels good to have completed the work, by my body is an aching, creaky mess from spending hours at a time curled up on the couch with bad posture.  For breaks, I cooked meals, helped by daughter with homework and talked over the points of my paper with my husband, but I was pretty much engaged with writing for two days.

And the reckoning?  Aside from an extra pound on the scale, I’m faced with that “starting-over” feeling!

Solution?  Sun salutations, lots of stretching, really gentle shadow boxing and a brisk walk!  Abs can come later.  This sort of unfold-the-bones workout can be really helpful whenever you’ve been through a period of shall we say intense cerebral activity, aka, lying in bed watching TV, after a brief illness, or as in my case, when you’ve been on a deadline in a work or other context and have needed to type on a computer for long periods of time.

The point is not to despair — but to work it out.  I always find that a couple of days of modest meals also helps.  Not to the point of hunger, but just enough to feel as if I’ve given my body a real shot at dropping that extra pound before it gets to happy hanging around with all those other extra pounds.

Five Minutes

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Five minutes 

Sometimes all I have is five minutes.  Five minutes to write, stretch, meditate, shadow box, lift weights or as my friend Stephen says, drift.  Those five minutes can be a precious commodity.  Five whole minutes for myself and myself alone.  Sometimes it is five minutes to take a little sleep.  Or five minutes to run downstairs and get an iced coffee.

“Give me five minutes,” can be a refrain when I’m supposed to be somewhere and need to finish something or maybe it’s that I need that little edge.  That moment I use to restore myself and reset my clock before I go on to the next task.

Today I gave myself five minutes to write.  Not unlike the boxer’s three-minute round, those five minutes were my little bit of space that I reveled in as a little secret to myself.  My five minutes to do with what I wanted.

The daily something

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The daily something.

In the last years before my mother’s death this past June, she read from the “Daf Yomi” – a nearly seven and a half-year cycle of readings and commentaries from the Babylonian Talmud. (For the uninitiated, the Talmud consists of the Torah or first five books of the old Testament plus commentaries by learned Rabbis from around the year 400 onward.)

She described it at first as an inquiry into something that had been denied to her as a young girl. Rather like forbidden candy, the mysteries of the Torah were intriguing to her, akin to wearing your older sister’s jewelry or sneaking out after dark (with a please pardon for the religious out there who might feel offended by the comparison).

Over time, the process of her daily readings went from breaking a taboo, to duty and on into a realm of grace.  The daily reading of two pages of text and commentary became a punctuation mark of her twenty-four hour cycle.  Both a beginning and an end, the cycle of readings brought her closer to assuaging the spiritual hungering that had walked along side her most of her life, as well as an opportunity to order the disordered world of illness and increasingly diminished physical health.

In thinking through the idea of a daily something, it struck me that so much of our lives is lost to the constant interplay between the “have to’s” and the “need to’s,” as in I have to wake-up, have to get to work, need to pick-up the dry cleaning, have to make dinner, and so on.  What’s left then for a quiet space of being?  Of dwelling in the mind or the body.  And if not a daily reading of a spiritual work — a Daf Yomi, what then?

It’s a question many of us lose sight of.   And resolvable in a myriad of ways; as a daily dose of shadow boxing in the mirror, a morning run, a meditation or even a daily write.  The point is to find a space — an “n” length of time that can mark a beginning and end of a twenty-four cycle.  A punctuation mark that belongs to oneself and oneself alone.  And maybe it’s nothing more than singing one song every morning, but in the end that span of experience represents a moment unlike all the other moments in the day.  Multiply that times a number of days, weeks, months and years, and one can really be on to something.  A sacred space that is bounded by all the junk out there, but from which one can find great solace and even joy.