Permission

No one has to give permission to plants for them to start growing once the appropriate conditions are met — not even the plants themselves. (As far as we can tell, in terms of the human definition of ‘permission,’ anyway.) They also don’t look up through the debris at the sky and wonder how in the hell they could possibly make it through; those that take root in landscaping rock and between slabs of concrete don’t agonize over how unfortunate their lot is compared to those who landed in a large expanse of rich soil, either.

More on Trajectory

Ambient silence is different than that experienced in noise cancelling headphones, or by plugging one’s ears. A few days ago, I was sitting in the living room during the dark, early morning on my day off when the power went out. I was alone in the house, aside from my cat Steven, and it was uncanny, how the environment changed so suddenly and absolutely.

Trajectory

Change has always been hard for me. This isn’t a unique struggle by any stretch of the imagination, of course, but this time of year, it seems to be one of those extremely salient struggles.

The New Year is a ridiculously huge deal in marketing, especially in the industries of “fitness” and “self-improvement.” I put those words in quotations because an overwhelming majority of what those programs, diets and methods push tend to propagate nebulous, wildly unattainable definitions of the words fitness and self-improvement.

All my life, I’ve waded through a multitude of these options, without even really having an idea of what my definitions of ‘fit’ or ‘self-improvement’ even were. It ranged from, “If I’m skinny, people won’t notice how emotionally fucked up I am,” to “One day, I’ll never feel like shit again.”

Trust

Trust is one of those many important words that goes undefined, or worse, loosely defined. Even in Merriam-Webster, the verb form definition of  ‘trust‘ is peppered with squishy words like ‘believe’, ‘hope’ and ‘expect’. It doesn’t matter how confident I am in something if it simply isn’t backed by reality.

The way I’ve learned from others — both in positive and negative situations — to define trust is simply this: Behavior over time.

Swim Purposefully

It gets dark early this time of year here, even with Daylight Savings Time, but now and then the sun will break through for a little while. It was during one of these moments I happened to notice my cat, Steven, sitting in the sun, one leg stretched out with little toes spread as she combed her stripes.

I called her name and within moments, she was in my lap, doing that slow familiar purr, the click-roll that somehow initiates on both inhale and exhale. She chirped a little as I scratched the soft dip under her chin, between the branches of her bottom jaw, then  moved my fingertips to the back of her skull, finding a muscle and pressing gently on it as I continued to smooth her fur down.

Someday, she will die, and these kinds of interactions will cease. Then, some amount of days after that, I’ll die too. But in that moment on that random winter afternoon, we curled up on the suede couch together and she barely cracked an eye, flitting one ear to the side to see if the sound of the heater turning on was something to worry about. Apparently satisfied that nothing was out of the normal, she went back to enjoying the lavish attention.

Seeing her lapse back into full relaxation, I found myself winded by one of those slow existential punches to the gut.

Current Best

My best is not static.

Some days this summer, I was capable of working a 10+ hour day as a PCA/school attendant to a highly-active little boy with Down’s syndrome and type 1 diabetes — and then I’d do a workout, get some chores done around the house and then usually squeeze in something creative of one type or another. Those are the kinds of days the ‘me’ of four years ago literally couldn’t have imagined for herself.

Then again, even with years of good work on myself and my capabilities, some days are like today: a struggle.

Do Not Stop

Setting up and executing workouts alone with my home equipment is exceptionally difficult for me. The superficial reason is because there are so many other options on how I could spend my time — reading, playing video games, doing an endless cascade of dishes and laundry, or even escaping into my closet of a ‘studio’ stuffed to the gills with countless creative opportunities multiplied by at least a half-dozen mediums.

But the underlying, and much more realistic reason, is that it’s easier for me to embrace the security blanket of familiar failure. I know I’m by no means unique in that inclination (though I’ve never been comforted by knowing I’m not the only one suffering) and I have come a long way in the past years — but even still, I find myself swimming upstream against my own excuses and subconscious efforts in denial. 

Just Start

As I started this, I was sitting in a laundromat because my life partner’s father’s washing machine blew a belt. I didnt’t mind being there, even though there were a ton more people than I thought for 08:00 on a Saturday morning, and even though there was a bare florescent light bulb strobing above the only open table, there were also cartoons on the nearest TV so I didn’t mind that, either.

A couple weeks ago, I attended my fifth Violence Dynamics Prime seminar, and while I was there, I chatted with a few of the instructors who make a living sharing what they’ve learned — in a travel-the-world, mass-following, write-significant-blogs-and-books kind of way. I shared with them my first inklings of a nebulous, persistent urge I have to somehow Help People. (Sounds like a good thing, right?) Except I hadn’t really defined almost anything about it for myself.