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May. 15th, 2019 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cleolindaI promised myself I'd try to post more often, and then I... lost all focus and executive function. I'm not sure why? I'm in a reasonably good mood for the most part. I think there may be a kind of depression that's a downswing of sorts, but it doesn't necessarily affect you emotionally as it does physically. See, I'm losing the will to write even as we speak, my attention just sort of wants to... dribble off. So, let me write about the first thing I can think of just to get something down:
I took a walk on Monday, and I only managed fifteen minutes, but that was three times as long as the last walk I took! (The spinal surgery, remember.) Today, I walked for half an hour. Amaze. The reason I have to stop, by the way, is not so much that I get tired as that my back gradually gets achy, and then it goes, "Yeah, okay, you have about two minutes to get back to the deck and up the stairs or it's The Crawling Times again." I just suddenly know. Also, both my feet are fucked up for different reasons, so sometimes they're the reason I have to stop. Today I didn't get the Abort Mission! aches until half an hour in: thus, my accomplishment. That's what I was up to at my best last summer! Get hype.
(Something interesting I had to learn: the difference between ache and pain. An ache, by my definition, does hurt in a persistent kind of way, but it'll pass with rest, and it's telling me that I'm pushing myself near my limits, or maybe I'm hitting that wall right now, or maybe I've even pushed too far already. It is, as they say, A Good Hurt. A useful communication. A pain is more acute and comes with an ineffable sense of badness; it tells me that something is wrong, and whatever I'm doing, I need to quit it right now. At this point I live with what's generally termed "chronic pain," I think, but yeah, by my definition I'd call it "chronic ache." It's more about limits and over-the-counter painkillers and activity management, as opposed to the times that I actually strain my back and end up on a heating pad for several days at a shot. Honestly, I'm... fairly cheerful about this? My family has been very understanding whenever I say, yeah, nah, I've hit my limit, I need to go lie down now. They respect the chronic ache situation, in other words, and that's not a small thing.)
Also, yes: I walk back and forth out behind our house, because our yard is wide but shallow; there's not a whole lot to it, but it's a decent mini-runway length. People always tell me I should go walking out In The Neighborhood, because they're not aware that The Neighborhood is a series of heavily-forested death curves. Nah, y'all. The hell I'm gonna be out there getting my ass hit by a car. I already have no stamina in the first place, and I have no idea when exactly my back will betray me and start the Collapse Timer.
The other thing people don't seem to understand is that a "boring" walk does not bore me. I don't want to be out there gazing at the foliage and listening to the birds and getting hit by a car because I'm not paying attention to the road. I want to put earbuds in my ears and music in my brain and play one or two songs on repeat and just completely zone out. Wooden planks below me, tree branches above me, daydreams inside me. I honestly view it as an ersatz kind of mindfulness--I don't know that I can really say it's true meditation because I'm not clearing my mind of all thought, but for however long I can manage to walk, it's what I want to think about and only that, and maybe "that" is simply the lyrics of the song or the vocal inflections or the instrumentation, my brain wandering from one layer to the other like I'm walking the paths of the musicality over and over as well as across the boards, back and forth. I like a boring walk, it makes me happy.
Also it gave me a blister on the pad of my foot today, so that's hot. Wear decent socks, kids.
(Patreon! Twitter! Tumblr!)
I took a walk on Monday, and I only managed fifteen minutes, but that was three times as long as the last walk I took! (The spinal surgery, remember.) Today, I walked for half an hour. Amaze. The reason I have to stop, by the way, is not so much that I get tired as that my back gradually gets achy, and then it goes, "Yeah, okay, you have about two minutes to get back to the deck and up the stairs or it's The Crawling Times again." I just suddenly know. Also, both my feet are fucked up for different reasons, so sometimes they're the reason I have to stop. Today I didn't get the Abort Mission! aches until half an hour in: thus, my accomplishment. That's what I was up to at my best last summer! Get hype.
(Something interesting I had to learn: the difference between ache and pain. An ache, by my definition, does hurt in a persistent kind of way, but it'll pass with rest, and it's telling me that I'm pushing myself near my limits, or maybe I'm hitting that wall right now, or maybe I've even pushed too far already. It is, as they say, A Good Hurt. A useful communication. A pain is more acute and comes with an ineffable sense of badness; it tells me that something is wrong, and whatever I'm doing, I need to quit it right now. At this point I live with what's generally termed "chronic pain," I think, but yeah, by my definition I'd call it "chronic ache." It's more about limits and over-the-counter painkillers and activity management, as opposed to the times that I actually strain my back and end up on a heating pad for several days at a shot. Honestly, I'm... fairly cheerful about this? My family has been very understanding whenever I say, yeah, nah, I've hit my limit, I need to go lie down now. They respect the chronic ache situation, in other words, and that's not a small thing.)
Also, yes: I walk back and forth out behind our house, because our yard is wide but shallow; there's not a whole lot to it, but it's a decent mini-runway length. People always tell me I should go walking out In The Neighborhood, because they're not aware that The Neighborhood is a series of heavily-forested death curves. Nah, y'all. The hell I'm gonna be out there getting my ass hit by a car. I already have no stamina in the first place, and I have no idea when exactly my back will betray me and start the Collapse Timer.
The other thing people don't seem to understand is that a "boring" walk does not bore me. I don't want to be out there gazing at the foliage and listening to the birds and getting hit by a car because I'm not paying attention to the road. I want to put earbuds in my ears and music in my brain and play one or two songs on repeat and just completely zone out. Wooden planks below me, tree branches above me, daydreams inside me. I honestly view it as an ersatz kind of mindfulness--I don't know that I can really say it's true meditation because I'm not clearing my mind of all thought, but for however long I can manage to walk, it's what I want to think about and only that, and maybe "that" is simply the lyrics of the song or the vocal inflections or the instrumentation, my brain wandering from one layer to the other like I'm walking the paths of the musicality over and over as well as across the boards, back and forth. I like a boring walk, it makes me happy.
Also it gave me a blister on the pad of my foot today, so that's hot. Wear decent socks, kids.
(Patreon! Twitter! Tumblr!)
