#14. Yoga-ing

I have a vision of myself that exists completely separately from reality. It is yoga me. I am strong and serene. Calm and capable. I am flexible and centered. Nothing fazes me. I am lean and sleek, physically and emotionally. I am Yoga Jules. There was a brief window of time – maybe five years and twenty pounds ago – when Yoga Jules was a reality. Well, not entirely, but far closer to reality than now. I discovered a hatha-based style of yoga called anusara and it spoke to me. For those of us with fibromyalgia, any physical activity can be problematic. One day, a certain set of movements is entirely possible; the next day, not so much. It requires flexibility and patience.

I found those things in anusara yoga. I liked its emphasis on proper alignment and understanding your body. I liked that it was rooted in knowing your own limitations, allowing me to move at my own pace, that it was gentle and forgiving. I liked its philosophy, based on the concept of intrinsic goodness and firmly rooted in a sense of gratitude and connectivity to the world around me. It made sense to me. I learned to do the best I could, listen to my body. I didn’t feel as frustrated or competitive as I had in other yoga classes.

I liked anusara yoga enough that, for a very short window of time, I developed a daily yoga practice. Not a strenuous one, but a somewhat dedicated one. I attended a 90-minute yoga class twice a week. I breathed a lot more than I am aware of doing now. I got stronger. Not strong, mind you, but stronger. I felt good. Not just physically, although the regular practice helped loosen up the muscles that plague me most. I felt quieter inside than I had in a long time, like my sense of purpose had shifted, my place in the world slightly redefined.

This lasted maybe six months. Then life changed. We moved to Ann Arbor, at first temporarily, for a very busy academic year in which there was so much going on that yoga simply fell off my radar. I focused more on cardio workouts and weight loss and waist size and dropped a few pounds. My knees ached and my shoulders hurt, but I ignored my body and barreled forward anyway.

Then this year came and I don’t know what it was that drove me back to yoga, but something did. I think it was probably whatever is underlying all this effort to change, whatever this sense of disquiet and seeking is. I found a beginner’s class at a yoga studio near my house and I even convinced Chris to go with me. (This is a brave thing for a marathon runner to do; runners are fit, but they do not bend. Yoga is hard for him.)

The thing about yoga is that – like most things – if you truly want to make any progress, really feel the benefits, you have to stick with it. I’ve been dabbling. A class one week, then a couple of weeks off. I needed a kick in the rear to be consistent. I needed to figure out how to get to a place where I would have a daily yoga practice. I decided the best way might be to have a daily yoga practice. For seven days in a row.

Yeah, you see where I’m going with this. Here, I share with you my yoga diary for the week:

Wednesday

Day One. I roll out the old mat, get to kickin’ around the floor. And I do. What I learn most on that first day is: I probably can’t be left to my own devices. I don’t know what I’m doing. Everything I think I know about yoga goes out the window and I find myself on my hands and knees, pushing back into a downward dog and wondering what comes next.

I have some yoga CDs, including one by John Friend, who created the anusara yoga movement. I pop that baby in. I get through about thirty minutes of the first hour-long workout on the CD. I bend. I stretch. I have zero stick-to-it-iveness. I’m riding on the fact that just trying counts, but it when I roll up my mat and stick it in a corner, it feels a little bit like I’m trying to get away with something. Which doesn’t seem that yogic.

Thursday

Thursday is yoga class day, which is a good thing. It means dragging my ass to the yoga studio, committing to a full hour. It means facing the reality between Yoga Jules and who I actually am.

The thing is, I want Yoga Jules to be powerful and strong and capable…and dry. But when I do yoga with even a slight effort, I sweat like a hog. It ain’t pretty, but there it is. I have the double curse of being a head sweater with thin, fine hair, so it only takes about one and a half downward dogs until I look like I just stepped out of the shower. My hands get so sweaty, I’m practically flying off my mat while all around me, thin girls in adorable yoga outfits are bending and swaying like delicate flowers. Dry, unsweaty delicate flowers.

This will be my undoing, in yoga and in life: comparing myself to others. It is the gateway to my defeatism. I look at  a young woman effortlessly coming into plank pose, and I don’t think about how she is younger than me, lighter than me, probably doesn’t have a disorder that causes her muscles to burn and weaken. I think, instead: I should be doing that. I should be able to do that. I suck.

This is the drawback of yoga in a group: the constant comparing myself to others around me. The benefit is that, because my ego is raging and competitive, I won’t give up. Whereas at home I might give in when my thigh screams in a high lunge, in a class environment, I will hang in there, really pushing myself. I will do that 53^rd triangle pose, even when I think my quad will buckle. I will come down to plank, even if I think it might kill me.

During class, I’m thinking about all of this so much I’m quite certain I’m not being very yogic at all. After Savasana, the corpse-pose relaxation at the end of class, our teacher says we need to all remember to honor our own individual abilities. That we need to listen to our hearts and do what’s right for us. It seems like she’s talking directly to me. Point taken, yoga lady. We are supposed to name an intention and carry it through our practice with us. Mine is: gentle effort. Now I just need to try to carry it with me through the next five days.

Friday

I’m jazzed. Yoga Jules is strong and alive. I take the time to design myself an iTunes playlist of the yoga poses I want to practice, want to get stronger at. Even the ones I hate, which includes everything involving upper body strength.

It’s a one-hour practice and carrying my intention of gentle effort with me, I sweat and struggle through the whole goddamn thing. The warrior poses threaten to kill me. I try hard to remember this is something I’m doing for me, not an arcane form of punishment. I try to breath. Remember gentle effort. Gentle effort. I survive.

Saturday

One hour of yoga. Lower body, mostly floor poses. I suit up and show up. I do pretty well. Right on.

Sunday

Then life gets in the way. Life, and possibly the fact that I’m getting a little over trying to make a chunk of my day free for yoga. I’m clearly losing sight of the sense that this is a self-nurturing endeavor rather than an obligation.

I’m feeling rushed and pressured. I’ve got a potluck to prepare for, a house to clean. I don’t have much time. I do a different CD this time, with a different teacher. It lasts about ten minutes. She’s moving way too fast. So I regroup. I’m starting to hate yoga. I only do the poses I like to do. I recognize that I’m not exerting nearly the energy I would in class. I last about twenty minutes. Oh, well, I say. This is a very yogic thing to say. Oh, well.

Monday

I am so not feeling this. I feel like I’ve lost track of what made me want to do yoga in the first place. It’s becoming decidedly un-yogic, heavy with obligation. Even the part at the beginning, the breathing, the centering, it all feels fake.

Plus, my quads are done. They hate me. They’re not even speaking to each other, let alone me. I decide to try for ten minutes. Ten minutes of anything yogic. Some breathing. A few cat tilts, dog tilts. A little downward dogging. The phone rings. I see something shiny. I get distracted.  Yoga is over for the day.

Tuesday

Yoga class again. I confess that, on some level, I have been looking forward to this all week. It is day seven of yoga and I’m pretty sure that, as a result of my diligence – apparently I’ve chosen to forget the previous two days – I will be able to perform yogic feats of unparalleled magnificence. I doubt I’ll even break a sweat.

This is not the case. But there is progress. Definite, undeniable progress. I find the little confidence I’ve gained during my week’s practice makes it easier for me to remember not to compare my abilities to those around me. And that’s not about my physical accomplishments, I don’t think. I think it’s more to do with the daily reminder I issued at the beginning of each day’s practice to honor myself.

My downward dog is stronger. My heels reach the ground on the first pass. My hands are steadier. Yes, by the third one, I’m still a bit shaky. The warrior poses cause my quads much consternation, but I do them anyway. And, yes, I sweat like a hog the whole time. Only, I don’t care as much.

Perhaps more than anything, the class seems over really quickly to me. An hour of yoga used to be torture. It’s not easy for me, but I can hang. I can hang!

Of all the changes I’ve attempted, there’s a big part of me that really wants to hang onto this change. Maybe it’s just because it’s tied to an idea of who I want to be. I wish I had confidence that I’ll maintain a daily yoga practice, but maybe I can take some of the yogic principles into my everyday life. That it’s the pausing and the breathing and the bowing to my own heart space, so to speak, that I need in my life. And I can make it to yoga twice a week. And I can practice my poses a little here and there at home. Yeah. I can do that. I’m practically a yogi, after all.

#13. Positive Thinking

When you’ve been with someone for a while, you develop little routines. Habits and such that, to the outside eye, might seem odd. Or ridiculous. Mostly because they’re odd and ridiculous. After my bath each night, as Chris watches, I try to toss my towel so that it lands on the hook on the back of the bathroom door. And Chris offers me ridiculous prizes if I do it, as I am not very good at it. One time, it was giant inflatable pandas. He bought me three. Now, it’s turtles. I get a turtle for every time the towel lands on the hooks. It’s been weeks now and I’m up to five or six. One night last week, after my bath, towel in hand, I closed my eyes and concentrated really hard before making my toss.

“What are you doing?” Chris asked.

“I’m doing The Secret on it,” I said. He asked what the hell I was talking about. “You know, The Secret. That book-slash-movie-slash cult from years ago? About how if you think and envision things they’ll come true? It was huge. It was on Oprah.”

He looked at me funny. “Go for it,” he said.

I did, reader. I went for it. First, I closed my eyes and I did The Secret. Now, to be honest, I really have no idea what the hell The Secret entails. I think I read about it in People once and, either rightly or wrongly, formed the vague impression that it was all about harnessing the power of the mind to envision the things you want in life and get them just by thinking positively. It’s my understanding that if you do it right, you will be a billionaire in about 15 minutes. I might have some of the particulars wrong, but that’s what I was going with.

Regardless, that night I closed my eyes and I visualized my towel landing neatly on the hook. I visualized what it would feel like, the thrill and surprise. I visualized the look on Chris’ face when I amazed and astounded him with my skill. I opened my eyes and I told myself that I believed with every fiber of my being that I would land this sucker.

And…I did. The towel flew out of my hands and went straight to the hook as if drawn there like a magnet.

That was it. The week’s change was set. If positive thinking could get me a turtle, who knows what else it would get me? I couldn’t wait to find out. I kind of want to be a billionaire.

I told anyone who would listen that I was doing The Secret. Of course, I don’t know if I was or I wasn’t. I tried to Google it, but the web site creeped me out so much I just decided to do my own version of it. And I have to say that, of all the changes I’ve undertaken – with the possible exception of exercising – none has been so alien to my natural state of being as positive thinking.

I don’t like to quote Bill Maher, mostly because he’s a douche and partly because he’s not really that quotable, but in this month’s Vanity Fair, he described himself as “cautiously pessimistic.” I can relate, but I’m not as cautious about my pessimism as I like to think I am. I’m also not sure whether I’m a pessimist or a cynic, but I’m too discouraged to try to figure it out. The worst-case scenario is my go-to. I worry about everything. On some level, I fear it’s all going to be a huge disaster and nothing good will ever happen, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Part of this, I think, is a protective measure. I’d rather prepare for the worst and be pleasantly surprised than hope for the best and be disappointed. It’s just how I roll.

My husband, however, is the opposite. He’s just sort of convinced that things are going to work out for the best, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Where positive thinking ends and delusion begins I’m not sure, but I think I have a fairly good idea – and it’s sleeping next to me.

So of course I needed to figure out what the hell it was going to mean for me to think positively, especially when my default setting tends to skew in the other direction. Did it mean that I had to be Little Mary Sunshine, gleefully presuming the positive in all matters? Should I abandon all pragmatism and measured response? Or did it just mean that when my natural tendency towards the negative kicked in, I would try my best to retrain my thinking and focus on the positive?

I have a friend who says that every time you think or say something negative, you have to think or say three positive things to counter it. I see the wisdom behind that line of thinking, sort of like drowning negativity with love. But it’s also the sort of idea meant for someone who isn’t perhaps as relentlessly negative as I can be. Do the math. If being negative already takes up most of my day, how on earth would I fit in all those positive thoughts? Who has time for all that? I’d never get anything else done. I have TV to watch, people.

Instead, I picked some very specific things about which I wanted to change my thinking. Things that have been worrying me of late, bringing me to the verge of panic attacks. Health outcomes for family members. The sale of our house in St. Louis, which has been on the market for over a year now, whose siding is showing wear and tear and whose price tag we keep chipping away at with no change in response. Even the fate of the novel I’ve been working on for the past couple of years, which I recently sent out for feedback and in the hopes of finding an editor.

For the first few days, each morning when I got up and each night before bed, I set aside a few moments for active positive thinking. I closed my eyes and walked through each of the scenarios in my head, imagining what it would look like or feel like to experience a positive outcome. Mostly, it felt…weird. It wasn’t the most genuine sensation on earth for me. It felt like I was pretending to be something I’m not, but there was definite pleasure in it. Picturing people I love well and healthy. Imagining some family our young couple discovering our house is exactly what they want. Hearing positive feedback about my book.

It wasn’t a terrible sensation. In fact, there was a terrific amount of relief surrendering to the idea that everything could work out well. I tried not to dwell on whether I was wishing or believing, tried not to work to undermine whatever amazing magical powers The Pseudo-Secret was bestowing upon me. I just let it flow, man. It didn’t suck.

I also sought counsel from other people on how to approach the idea. At a dinner party, I told friends I was trying to think positively. They laughed. When they’d finished, which took quite a while, I told them about my version of The Secret. I told them about trying to visualize good things, then I remembered reading about how people made vision boards, where they pasted images that represented their positive outcomes.

“I would completely try that,” I mentioned, “if I wasn’t also completely lazy.”

“There’s an app for that,” a friend said. And she wasn’t lying! Of course there’s an app for that! Imagine! For just 99 cents, I could download my own vision board for my phone and add things to it. Done! I went home that night and got to work. I made a little starburst that said: “House Sold!” I took a photo of my towel hanging on the hook. I made a little note about the people I love being safe and protected. I took a picture of the place in my bookshelf my novel would be if it was every published and wrote “YOUR BOOK GOES HERE.” There was even a default photo of a big pile of cash which I, of course, left on there. Couldn’t hurt.

Then, for the remaining few days of the experiment, I would whip out my vision board throughout the day. I would look at each of the items on there, close my eyes for a few moments and really try to feel what it would be like if they were true. It was, I’m a bit embarrassed to say, tough not to get excited about it. There’s a giddiness that comes, a real temptation, with believing you just might get everything you dream of. Which might explain why so many suckers bought The Secret book in the first place.

And the outcome? I know you’re dying to hear how thinking positively changed my life forever. But, dear reader, I still haven’t heard anything back about my book. Loved ones didn’t suddenly get well – although, in fairness, they didn’t get worse, either. I didn’t win the mega millions. My house did not sell, even as the tax rebate deadline approached and passed.

I discovered that my fear and insecurity about these issues runs so deep that I felt overwhelmed enough to abandon all attempts at positive thinking on Sunday morning and allow myself a good, long self-indulgent cry. I allowed myself twenty minutes of dumpster diving into my old mindset, that the house will never find a buyer and it will hang around my neck like an albatross forever, bleeding us dry and causing me to lose sleep. Twenty minutes to worry that the people I love will die and that we’ll never be out of debt and that I’ll never be a published author.

I can’t say that abandoning my positive attitude felt better. It didn’t. But it felt more genuine for me, at least in that moment. And, for better or worse, it felt more familiar. It made me realize that surely what we’re supposed to have in all of this is some sort of balance. Is that what people have been meaning all these years when they’ve told me it’s about hope, not expectation?

That is not to say that all was lost, dear reader. Because I did experience something amazing last week. For four nights in a row, I closed my eyes, visualized the towel landing neatly on the hook – and it did. For four nights in a row, Chris and I laughed with increasing disbelief and my turtle count skyrocketed. Until the fifth night. Maybe I wasn’t feeling it so much because it was the last night of the week of this positive thinking and the wind was already leaking out of my metaphorical tires. I know that when I tried to visualize a successful outcome, it didn’t work as well. I had trouble imagining the feeling of triumph and picturing the look of glee on Chris’ face.

Still, I prepped my stance and let the towel fly. For a split second, it caught on the edge of the hook before its weight pulled it to the floor. I looked at Chris. “

I think I broke The Secret,” I said.

He nodded and sighed and I think we both knew that the winning streak was over. I looked down at the towel in a pile and felt so empty. So disappointed. But I felt something else, a feeling like the pressure was off, that things were the way they were and I might not have to work so hard to try to change them. I think there’s a name for that feeling. I think it’s relief.

#12. Making things (FAIL)

Oh, friend. How I’ve let you down. If you’ve come here for wacky tales of how I changed this past week – especially after last week’s dubious, existential ranting about not-changing – how sad and disappointed you will be. I hope you have someone to hold and comfort you. This week, you see, was supposed to be about getting creative, about making things. I love, love, love to make things with my own two paws. I like to knit, sew, embroider, crack tiles and past ‘em together into mosaics, mix up bath potions, glue cotton balls and twigs together into Christmas ornaments and make shoebox dioramas of Johnny Tremain. (Okay, the latter I haven’t done since fourth grade, but I loooooooooooooved it then.)

However, I haven’t been making much stuff lately, which I realized as I was dusting and discovered a thick layer of filth coating my sewing machine. (This, by the way, is super good for sewing machines. Nothing ensures smooth performance like a motor full of dust.) I couldn’t actually remember the last time I’d dragged out my machine, yet it sits in the corner of my dining room, surrounded by spools of thread and lengths of fabulous fabric, waiting to be used. When, exactly, did I stop using it?

It occurred to me that maybe this was contributing to the disquiet I’d been feeling, this remove from the creative side of myself. The last vestige was just some catatonic knitting while watching TV. I could argue that that didn’t really involve the focus that a major sewing project did, or a mosaic or even doodling freehand embroidery for a pillow.

So I decided to spend the week making things again, even if that was daunting. Even if that meant having to re-learn stuff I’m embarrassed to have forgotten in the first place. I decided I would make one thing a day. Then that seemed ludicrous. Maybe not an entire thing, but I would make something – work on something – every day.

Only…then, I didn’t. The first day, depending on your definition, I may have adhered. I made a bookshelf. That’s right, from scratch. I went outside and I felled a tree from our front yard. (The big one, the 50 footer. It’ll grow back, right?) I chopped the wood. I cut it, sanded it, planed it, mitered it, then I constructed a modest three-shelf unit for our dining room. That felt like plenty, so I quit for the week.

Okay. That’s not what happened at all. I put together an Ikea bookshelf and somehow convinced myself that, at least for that day, I’d made something. Now, I recognize that I was perhaps adhering to the letter of the law rather than the spirit. I may have technically constructed a thing, but it didn’t really tap into my creativity, which was really supposed to be the focus. I resolved to do better the next day, finally tackling a tough

Then I took allergy medicine and it made me sleepy and I didn’t do anything for four days. Wow. That sounds even more lazy than I thought it would. In fairness, I didn’t feel well. My resolve waned. I was just so low energy. So…uninspired. And, on top of it, I had a family issue going on and I allowed myself to go off into a place of fear and worry where the only thing I could conceivably been making were ulcers.

I had a moment or two in there when I thought: I’m making my bed, that’s something. I even had a point on Saturday where I really, truly believed I should get points for making a sandwich. I’d clear lost sight of this assignment. Possibly of reality. The week of change had failed. Completely and totally.

So there you have it. My excuse, such as it is. But next week will be different. It has to be. Why? Because at this point, I’m even boring myself.

#11. Not changing

Bear with me, would you? I realize how the title of this post alone could lead you to the conclusion that this a giant, oxymoronic cop out. Change by Not Changing? What the what? But there is a method to my madness. Some rationale behind my decision-making process. Not much. Not the sort that holds water. But some. A few weeks ago, I was talking to my therapist about this blog. (Yes, I understand it will shock you to know that someone as together as I am has a therapist. Even diamonds need polished occasionally. Now you know.) I’d been struggling with this project of changing. It isn’t the actual changes I’ve selected in past weeks, although those have given me plenty of trouble. What I’ve been struggling with is the philosophy behind feeling like I need to make all these changes.

I found that a by-product of weeks and weeks of change-focused thinking was the attendant conclusion that if change was necessary, it must be because I am defective. In other words, it’s difficult for me to think about things I need to change without internalizing the message that there is something wrong with me in the first place. It was, for lack of a better turn of phrase, bumming me out.

I felt like my thinking about it was all screwy. I felt like I needed a break from changing. I considered taking a week off from this blog, but my ego wouldn’t let me. So then I wondered what would happen if I just spent a week not changing. By the very loosest definition, wouldn’t that count as a departure from what I’d been doing and, therefore, qualify?

I mulled over and over in my head the crucial issue of semantics. Was I spending the week trying not to change or not trying to change? It struck me that there was a significant difference between the two. I didn’t want to resist change; I wasn’t going for stagnancy. It wasn’t a staunch refusal to evolve. It was, instead, the latter of the two: not trying so hard to change. Just being. Going about my life and seeing what it looked like when not filtered through a prism of: change, you need to change, you must change.

I needed some time to sit with myself, quietly and feel okay about wherever I happen to be right now. You could go so far as to say that it’s not so much about changing or not changing as it is about accepting things exactly as they are. Which is no picnic, either.

The benefit of this relatively calm period was that when I wasn’t focused so strongly on transformation, I was able to reflect on how much I’ve already changed. I wasn’t so focused on the Next Big Undertaking that I failed to notice how much this journey has affected my daily life. It afforded me a little temperature-taking.

I noticed that, for the most part, I’m still a daily bed maker. There have been one, maybe two, days since this all began that I haven’t started out with a freshly made bed. My prayer life and stabs at meditation are evolving far more slowly, but they are evolving. I don’t know yet that I eat a whole lot less meat than I did before my week of being vegetarian, but I sure think about eating less meat. Does that count? A little?

I’ve gotten better at letting things go. It’s not always my go-to reaction, but it’s easier to land there when I’m finished my mental wrestling. And exercise. Since last week’s crazy foray into exercise, I’ve managed to stay committed to moving around. Not as vigilantly, but the forward progress is there.

In fact, ironically enough, if there’s anything I learned from taking a week to stop changing it’s that I’m still in motion. I’m still making progress even when I don’t feel like I am. Something about the gentle nature of that observation allows me to feel better again about this idea of pursuing change. It allows me to reframe it not as an indictment of my current state but as a reinforcement of it. We change not because we’re flawed, but because it’s part of the human condition. We are programmed to move forward, so we do. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us. It just means we’re living.

Or so I think today. Check back with me next week when I’ve actually been trying again.

Small Changes

A friend shared this reflection about small changes. Seemed fitting.

#10. Exercising

This will be a short entry. I apologize. I’m not feeling very writer-y. Turns out I used up all my writerness this week on another project and who suffers? You do. And when you suffer, we all suffer. Or something like that. Speaking of suffering, I did it, folks. For once, I did not show up here with a sheepish explanation of why I failed at this week’s experiment or why I did it five days out of seven or some such nonsense. No, I exercised for seven days in a row.

Now. I should probably qualify this, because I suspect what I consider exercise and what other, fitter people consider exercise are two very different things. I am not a physically active person. I’m out of practice. Out of shape. Out of, it turns out, excuses. So I set the bar very low: at least 30 minutes of exercise a day. Not necessarily gut-busting exercise, but breaking-a-sweat exercise. The main goal was to do it, not do it hard.

I get very anxious about the whole exercise thing. Figuring out how to be a person who exercises, consistently and properly, has plagued me for years. I did not grow up in a physically active family. We did not throw balls at one another on holidays. We read books. We sat around and ate. As a result, I have next to no physical prowess. It does not come naturally to me. There. Do you feel my struggle?

I am also an all or nothing person and while this may be a good thing for the world’s top athletes, for me it presents a problem. It sets me up, in the world of physical activity, for failure. You’d never know it to look at me now, but there was a time I worked out vigorously, obsessively even. I counted calories like a mad woman, never consuming more than 20 grams of fat per day and quickly increased my cardio workouts from 30 minutes to 45 to an hour. I took kick-boxing classes and step-aerobics classes. I lived on the elliptical cross trainer.

As a result, I lost a ton of weight, pretty quickly. Because of that, it’s tempting for me to think of that period in my life as positive. The truth is, I was just a different kind of unhealthy. I didn’t listen to my body. I learned nothing about eating right. I damaged my right knee because I didn’t have the patience to increase my intensity slowly, to work out properly.

A person simply can’t keep up that kind of pace. I couldn’t, anyway. Something changed, everything stopped. My workouts decreased, my waist line increased again. Since that period more than ten years ago, I’ve had an off-and-on, love-hate relationship with exercise. I do it in bursts. I generally overdo it, hurt my knee again and then the period of rest becomes three months, four. I’m out of the rhythm. I have TV to watch instead. You know how it goes.

I was not naïve enough to think that seven days of working out will change all that. I just felt like I needed what I need with great frequency: impetus to jump start my work out habits again. What I knew it would do – and what, annoyingly enough, it did – was remind me why I work out.

While that may sound obvious and simple, it’s actually a pretty complicated issue for me. I have to work very hard to divorce exercising from my expectations about weight loss and body image – otherwise it becomes an exercise (if you’ll pardon the pun) in self-defeat. I become crazy and obsessed and anxious and really, really hard on myself. It’s not a fun place to be.

Instead, I have to work to try to keep it about health, both mental and physical, and not about a number on the scale that isn’t behaving the way I want it to. That’s far easier said than done. It helps, I suppose, I believe wholeheartedly that I’m supposed to be moving my body, breaking a sweat on a daily basis. I have no philosophical issues with that. It does not help, however, that I hate exercising. I am not and never will be one of those people who enjoys working out. I enjoy having worked out. It’s hard to remain committed to an activity you’re only interested in being done with.

While I was tempted to get in my usual workout rut – elliptical at the Y – I tried for some variety this week. Sure, I played it safe: 30 minutes on the bike at the Y. That went okay. I huffed, I puffed. I sweated. I pushed myself but I also tried to pay attention to my knee. I survived.

Day two, I made my return to yoga for the first time in three months. I once did yoga faithfully, twice a week back in St. Louis with a terrific teacher. I never felt better or stronger or more calm and capable than when I had a regular practice. That was years ago. For the past couple of years, I’ve only dabbled. Going to classes for a few weeks in a row, then losing momentum. Yoga doesn’t work well if you’re inconsistent.

Returning to my yoga class – my beginner’s yoga class – nearly killed me. It’s humbling how difficult yoga is when you’re out of practice. I get so frustrated with myself and have to watch the self-defeating talk: you suck at this, so you should just give up. But with yoga, I don’t spend the entire time wishing it were over; I spend a lot of it just wishing I were better at it. And as crazy as that may sound, for me, it was progress.

The week rolled on, and so did I. Weather allowed me to take Orangey, my beloved Townie bike, out for her first ride of the year. Even sticking to the flattest land around us, it was tough. My muscles were crying out about being forgotten for months. Although it was humbling, I kept at it, riding back and forth, up and down the streets of the Old West Side until I’d met my time quota.

I went back to the Y. I did the elliptical. On a day when the fibromyalgia made my legs feel like they were on fire, I did the opposite of what my instincts said: I took a brisk walk outdoors. Next day, gym again. A week passed and, before I know it, I’d exercised every day. My muscles hurt. I had frozen corn strapped semi-permanently to my knee. But I felt good. Oh, readers, how I felt good!

It’s not new information, but it always feels like it: exercising daily makes me feel really good. For some odd reason, a week’s worth of exercise didn’t make me thin. But I had more energy. My husband will vouch that I was happier, less anxious about things. I slept better. I was more productive. You name it, the benefit was there.

All good news, right? So why do I get so friggin’ annoyed by it? Why do I still resist and hate the fact that exercise is good for me? I can think of nothing that better illustrates what I suspect is my innate aversion to self-care. If it’s positive, I want to do the opposite.

And nothing better illustrates that notion than the fact that as soon as my week of mandatory exercise was up, I skipped yoga class. I skipped the gym. For one day, I did nothing. It filled me with fear, though. That all-or-nothing thinking kicked in again: if I take one day off, then I might as well be done forever.

Sigh.

So this will be the challenge for me in the long run, my friends: balance. Figuring out how to silence the defeatist in me. Or, at least, talk over her loud enough to be heard. Now, if I can just wrestle her into some workout gear, we can get this train back on track. For today.

#9. Sleeping

I don’t sleep well. The hyperbolic in me would like to say that I’ve never slept well, but then you get some joker popping up from your past yammering about how you slept like a log when you were a baby. Which might be true, but what good does that do me now? I could blame my fibromyalgia, as the faboo one-two punch of chronic exhaustion paired with insomnia is one of the most common hallmarks of the disorder. But even giving that a hefty dose of credit, the truth is I don’t actually know that many people who say they sleep well or enough or who wake feeling rested and energetic.

Well, I for one, am tired of being tired. How about it? Are you with me? I said, ARE YOU WITH ME? Sorry. Got carried away. Lack of restorative sleep’ll do that to a gal. Anyhoo, by now you know where I’m headed with all this: I spent the past seven days in a row sleeping. Non-stop. Just sleeping. And now I’m caught up. The end.

Not really, of course. Instead, I decided to try to sleep better and, according to my highly scientific web research, that meant I needed to improve my sleep hygiene. Which meant, first and foremost, I had to find out what the hell sleep hygiene is. According to Wikipedia – the great arbiter of all that is true in the world – sleep hygiene refers to “all behavioural and environmental factors that precede sleep and may interfere with sleep.” In other words, it just means your sleep habits. But I prefer to say “hygiene,” because I think it makes me sound more expert-y.

So how bad is my sleep hygiene? Well, thank goodness, the web can offered up the perfect tool for a gal raised on the quizzes in the back of women’s magazines. So I took a Discovery Health online quiz to find out. Even as I was doing said quiz, I realized it doesn’t really take a test to tell you if you have bad sleep habits. I think if you’re tired, you probably already know the answer. But what fun is that?

I actually didn’t do as badly as I thought I would. I scored a 44 out of 100, which offended both the over- and underachiever in me, but still got me plenty scolded:

According to your sleep hygiene score, you clearly do not listen to your body's cues and you might be fighting its natural rhythm. Sleep is a necessity and though you may not feel the side effects yet, be assured that lack of sleep will catch up to you! Your results show that you need to make sleep a priority. You may think that you don't have enough time for proper sleep, but take the time to consider the facts; what you "lose" on sleep, you can recouperate in productivity because you will be rested and clear-headed.

Listen to that snarky tone: “you clearly do not listen to your body’s cues.” Up yours, Discovery Health! I won’t be insulted by an internet quiz that can’t even spell recuperate properly. Ha! I win due to good spelling once again.

Minor triumphs aside, the bottom line was I needed to figure out which changes, specifically, I would try to implement for the week in order to improve my sleep. I perused any number of websites for tips and suggestions and discovered most of them shared the same pearls of wisdom. I compiled the most frequent ones into this list to follow:

1. Don’t go to bed unless you are sleepy
2. If you’re not asleep within 20 minutes, get out of bed and do something else
3. Create night-time rituals to help you relax and enhance sleepiness
4. Go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning.
5. Avoid taking naps.
6. Don’t do anything other than sleep in bed. (No reading, watching TV, playing on the computer, etc.)
7. Don’t exercise late in the day.
8. Avoid caffeine after lunch.
9. Create a pleasant sleeping environment: keep your bedroom dark, quiet and a bit cool.

One of the first sites I found actually had rule #1 written as “do not sleep unless you are sleepy,” which seemed to me not only pretty funny but also patently impossible. So I went with the more sensible version of #1, even though the insomniac in me was grumbling about the fact that she’s always sleepy and it doesn’t seem to help much.

Ditto #2. I don’t remember the last time I fell asleep in less than 30 minutes. Thus, if I got out of bed if I wasn’t asleep within 20 minutes, by my calculations I’d have had exactly zero sleep in the past decade or so. Surely that can’t be what the spirit of what these “experts” meant. Thus, I decided to give myself 45 minutes to doze off.

Without question, #3 was my favorite! Who doesn’t love the idea of creating nighttime rituals? This is right up my alley. I already take a bath nearly every night, and now I could claim it was in service of a loftier aim. I filled my tub with only the most soothing-scented bath oils. I floated on a lavender cloud, got out and slathered on pretty, calming lotions. I filled my kettle and settled in with a cup of aptly-named sleepy-time tea. I practiced some deep breathing and tried to make my mind melt. Oh, I was so good at this one!

Similarly without question, though, #4 was not my favorite. The quality of my sleep varies wildly from night to night, so I was reluctant to commit to dragging my ass out of bed at a certain time if I wasn’t well-rested. (Well-rested being, for me, on a scale of bad to worse.) Same with going to bed. Instead, I gave myself a one-hour window for both, which seemed far more reasonable than my previous wild yo-yo-ing. (Best thing about running your own life-change experiment? Your rules.)

Number 5 was not really a problem. Generally, those who can’t fall asleep easily don’t nap well. But #6 was the worst. I didn’t think I could go seven days using my bed just for sleep. Now, please march to the gutter and retrieve your mind. I’m referring to reading in bed. I’m adamant about not having a TV in our bedroom and laptops are banished (admittedly, only at night), but no reading? My entire life I’ve read in bed before going to sleep. I wasn’t sure it was even possible for me to fall asleep without reading. Could this really be the problem?

Now, I’d heard #7 a bunch of times before and had broadly interpreted it to mean that if exercise late in the day was bad for sleep, then surely no exercise at all was best. Turns out that’s not true. Exercise actually helps you sleep, as long as its four to six hours before bed time. So, yes, dammit, I actually committed to getting some exercise. Some.

No caffeine after lunch? Piece of cake! After my grand (though largely failed) caffeine experiment a couple of weeks back, I’ve been much more aware of my caffeine intake, particularly later in the day. It felt good to have a concrete rule in place to avoid it after lunch. And if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll deny it.

Last, the pleasant sleeping environment. This one was only slightly problematic. I found that (again with the brownie points for prior change) making my bed in the mornings makes a much more pleasant atmosphere to come to at night. Our room’s pretty dark and I sleep with ear plugs in anyway. To top it off, I lit the candle next to my bed and let its scent fill the air before I climbed in for the night.

Yeah, yeah, you’re thinking, Enough about what she did. What about how she did?

I answer with a resounding: meh.

I mean, for the most part I stuck to my guns really well and I’m pretty proud of that. I’m just not really sure, in the end, that it made that much difference. I might have slept a little better, but the truth is it’s just hard to say how much difference all this effort really made.

Of course, I did, annoyingly enough, discover things about myself. Which, frankly, I’m already getting just a little bit tired of.

I discovered that – as with so many of the other changes I’ve attempted – my biggest obstacle seems to be that I lack an inner parent. Go ahead. Roll your eyes all you want. But we all need to have a sane, reasonable voice inside our heads, telling us to behave, to take good care of ourselves, not to stick our fingers in the fire place. I’m beginning to think my inner parent is deadbeat.

I’ve gotten myself all mixed up about sleep, so far removed from listening to my body. (Damn you, Discovery Health quiz, for being right!) Just because I’m sleepy at 11 doesn’t mean I’m not going to stay awake for two more hours knitting and watching reruns. No matter how much prep I’ve put into winding down, when it comes time to the action of getting my ass into the bed, I drag my feet.

So the big thing was having the sheer willpower to turn off the TV, put down my knitting and march my rear into the bed. The inner teenager/toddler in me is alive and well and she wants to stay up all night watching TV and behaving like a person who doesn’t have any actual responsibilities. The part of me that knows how to make sane, self-nurturing decisions is conspicuously absent at these times. I have to dig deep to find that voice.

The second biggest challenge was my monkey mind. I found that – relaxing scented candles be damned – if I snapped the light off right after falling into bed, most of the time all I did was think. Think, think, think. And not just about all the TV I could have been watching. I thought about everything that ever happened to me in my life, pretty much. Every problem that I’d ever had. Every problem I might have.

After a couple of nights of this madness, I decided I’d let myself read for a while. Yes, in bed, experts be damned. Turns out that reading is part of my falling asleep ritual. Maybe diving into a book makes other people’s brains pop alive, but not mine. Mine stops trying to work out the problems of my life and gets lost, hazily, in some fictional narrative. Things slow down. I get lost. I drift. I need to read to fall asleep.

So what does it all mean? In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, I think this experiment involved a faulty premise from the get-go. I realize now, I was relying on a list of arbitrary suggestions meant for normal people, not those with a chronic illness that affects sleep patterns. And, worst of all, I had the expectation that following this list diligently was going to solve everything once and for all.

Instead, I think that maybe the information I needed to get from this week is that the real experiment for me – the truly uncomfortable work – is trying to accept my fibromyalgia and not compare my sleep abilities to those of regular ol’ stressed out folks. That toddler/teen doesn’t wanna be different from other people, doesn’t wanna have those things. I need to find that parent, that voice that will help me work within my limitations without letting them define me.

Yeah. That all sounds good and mature and maybe even a little wise. I’d get right on it if I wasn’t so  goddamn tired.

#8. Un-procrastinating

I kid you not. As I realized I had to write this week’s blog entry, which is about a week spent trying not to procrastinate, my first thought was: maybe I can just wait until tomorrow to do it.

Sigh. I guess it didn’t take.

Although that isn’t to say I didn’t do swimmingly with this week’s experiment. (How boring would it be if you checked in and Every Week, I was all, “I forgot!” or “I failed!”?) In fact, I’m feeling pretty good about it. I feel…productive. Me! Productive!

In order to appreciate the hoops I jumped through this week, I must attempt to garner your sympathy – or at least, some perspective – by noting that I am a world-class procrastinator. If there were an Olympic event in procrastinating, I’d win a Gold medal. If it ever got started. Wait. How would you know? Wait. I did it again. I procrastinated writing the next sentence. I’m out of control.

As I was saying, I am a person who actually doesn’t see the point in doing right away what you could put off until later. Whether it’s leaving a dish in the sink rather than putting it directly in the dishwasher, or writing a piece for a client at midnight the night before it’s due, I will drag my feet. Need I remind you that I finished the first draft of a book last May – and with the one-year anniversary of that milestone fast approaching, I’ve managed to put off revising all but the first four chapters?

This all makes for a problematic existence sometimes, mostly in the area of self-imposed stress and, say, running out of clean dishes and/or underwear because I’ve put off operating whichever appliance and associate chore is required to remedy said situation.

You’d think those problems would be enough to cause a person to change, but no! I procrastinate changing! And I can rationalize my procrastination with the best of them. I tell people that I’m actually just misunderstood. I’m a thoughtful and very deliberate person. I don’t want to rush the dish into the dishwasher. I need time to process it, to think about it for a while before committing. (Of course, anyone who’s seen me impulse shop knows that this isn’t actually true.)

I will not regale you this week with a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of things I did not procrastinate the past seven days. I will just tell you that I, uncharacteristically, stuck to my guns ... and I got a hell of a lot done. Among the things I did this week, though, was an awful lot of thinking. A lot of observing my own reactions to life and its many challenges, vis-à-vis procrastinating. I shall generously share some of that wisdom with you, post-haste.

It appears as though one of my biggest procrastination triggers is boredom. It seems I don’t believe I should ever be bored or have to do anything boring. It has been brought to my attention that grownups do boring stuff they don’t want to do all the time. It is a fair point and probably very valid. It doesn’t make the idea of doing boring stuff more appealing to me, but maybe it makes it a little easier. It helped this week when responding to emails and cleaning the house and folding the laundry to know that this is what normal people do all the time.

A little. It helped a little.

It also turns out that deciding not to procrastinate is not nearly as cut and dry as one might think at the outset. Until it becomes possible for people to do everything all at once, some level of procrastination is absolutely necessary. Although, I noticed, at this point it’s called “prioritizing” and it’s perfectly acceptable.

The problem is, it seems, that I’m not innately good at prioritizing. Maybe if it’s something you could do just once and be done with it. But the hierarchy of things needing prioritized is always changing as new projects and challenges arise. And frankly, I can’t really be trusted to make good decisions. The very same chores I put off yesterday – cleaning my desk, filing papers – suddenly become “priorities”  when I’m faced with even less desirable tasks – emptying the litter box, paying bills. What I want to do – as opposed to what I need to do –  carries far too much weight to produce a reasonable conclusion.

In fact, it occurred to me about mid-week that maybe my real problem isn’t procrastinating at all; maybe it’s really just an inability to prioritize. It requires a lot of thinking on one’s feet, a lot of objectivity and honest assessment – skill sets that aren’t exactly in my wheelhouse.

At times there’s so much on my plate that I seriously can’t figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do next. Some choices are easy: I know that taking a bleeding spouse to the ER trumps wiping down the inside shelves of the medicine cabinet. But does laundry trump meeting a friend who’s going through a rough time?  Does a work project trump taking the laptop in for repair? (And what if you’re the sort of person who would inflict bodily harm on his or her spouse in order to avoid wiping down the inside of a medicine cabinet?)

How do you choose? Generally and historically, I have observed,  I don’t. I do neither. Until I can’t not do them anymore. Until a deadline is fast approaching or the laptop is making such crazy noises I’m afraid it might come to life and kill me while I sleep.

Even while trying to write this blog entry, I was faced with a conundrum. I got an email from the editor of a magazine I’d written a spec essay for. She wanted me to do some rewrites and get it back to her, preferably this afternoon. Even though Thursday afternoon’s my Blog Writin’ Time, I needed to set aside this piece of writing for that. Did that mean I was procrastinating or prioritizing? I’m still not sure, but I’m counting on the fact that as long as this entry posts sometime on Friday, as promised, I can at the very least claim it was the latter.

When I was fretting about this particular shortcoming of mine a few years back, a very kind and generous  friend pointed out that maybe instead of beating myself up about procrastinating, I should just accept that it’s who I am. That it’s how I go about things and it’s neither right nor wrong. I can get behind that logic…partially. I do write better at the last minute. That’s true. But I think it’s a stretch to apply that to other areas of my life. Can I honestly say that I do laundry better when I’m out of underwear or that I pay bills better when the electricity’s about to be shut off? Probably not so much.

Thus, this week of non-procrastination. Yes, I was crazy productive, and there’s no question that it felt good. I think it’s a change I’d like to keep, maybe with the volume turned down a tad.  In fairness to my more natural setting, I should also note that I’ve discovered that procrastinating serves a real and valid purpose – because not procrastinating is exhausting. All this doing stuff really wore me out.

At least now that the week’s up, I can indulge in a nap without worrying about whether I’m getting some rest or just procrastinating doing something more worthwhile. Phew. The pressure’s off.

#7. Decaffeinating

When I started this journey, I understood, at least on some level, that perhaps not all the changes I made would be monumental. I knew that not all attempts at change would make for riveting reading (or writing, for that matter). I suppose I even knew that the day would come when I would, in essence, fail completely at the challenge I chose for myself.

I’m just not sure I expected that day to come so soon. But, ladies and gentlemen, here we are.

In retrospect – and in my defense, weak as it may be – I would like to say that I’m not entirely sure why I thought giving up caffeine for a week was a good idea in the first place. I don’t mean why I thought it would make for thoughtful and titillating blog-fodder. I mean I don’t know why I thought it would be a change for the better.

Remember last week when I was feeling all lofty and philosophical and blathering something about how it’s like the universe prods me, tells me which change is next? Well, I blame that sort of ridiculous thinking for landing me here in the first place.

Last week, I had less than 24 hours at home between a trip to Iowa for a big family event and a business trip to Vegas. On the flight back to Detroit from Iowa, I felt very stressed and jittery. Much more so than usual. My intermittent fear-o-flying seemed to have returned with a vengeance. I was anxious and uncomfortable in my own skin.

By the time we took off for Vegas the next day, I was feeling loony and shaky and increasingly certain that something needed to change. I closed my eyes and might have been doing some combination of the praying/meditating I’ve written about recently when it hit me like a bullet: caffeine. I needed to give up caffeine.

It seemed to make so much sense at the time. I consume a fair amount of caffeine, although far less than CERTAIN PEOPLE in my household who can drink a pot of coffee at 9 pm and still fall asleep halfway through an episode of Bones. Me? The older I get, the more sensitive I seem to be to caffeine’s effects. More than a cup or so of Joe in the morning sends has me shaking like the DTs. (To be fair, that’s a cup of my husband’s coffee, which may actually be equal to three cups of normal person java. Still.)

I recall drinking Diet Coke by the gallon in my youth without much effect, whereas nowadays a couple refills at a restaurant and I’ll start to break out in sweats. (To be fair, I could have been mitigating the effects of all that Diet Coke in the old days by chasing it with gallons of beer, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Which brings us to why I somehow got the idea that if less caffeine was better, no caffeine would be best. It was, as the kids say today, an epic fail.

How epic? Let me tell you. For the first two days, I simply forgot that I was supposed to be avoiding caffeine. I could try to blame it on the fact that I was traveling, that my schedule and surroundings were off and my focus shifted onto Things That Are Not This Blog.

I could blame the fact that I woke up in a hotel room to my husband handing me lattes from the coffee shop downstairs. (I should note here that Chris is not an evil man. He is not given to fouling my efforts at reform. It’s just that, for some odd reason, my silly little changes aren’t always on the forefront of his mind whereas, apparently, serving me coffee in bed is. I believe firmly that we should keep those priorities intact.)

Two days in a row, it went something like this: I wake up, bleary eyed and unaccustomed to Pacific time. I reach for my fetched latte, situated conveniently bedside. I take a sip, burn my tongue. I wait for it to cool some, faffing around on the internet and playing Doodle Jump on my iPhone until it’s a suitable temperature. I drink, say, half said latte. Then I get out of bed and make my way towards the shower, at which point, it hits me: Damn it! No caffeine.

Thus, we have what I call Failure by Forgetting.

I start to panic. How can I write on my blog that I simply forgot? I try to tell myself that I really believe this is a process, that there is no cheating. No “pretending” I didn’t have caffeine those days because, who am I, anyway? James Frey? No. I have to be honest about drinking half a latte the first two days. I can be flexible. Honest and flexible. Thus, I adjust my sights, make it my mission to avoid caffeine for the remainder of those days. Who says I can’t keep trying to hit my goal? And isn’t this why God invented caffeine-free Diet Coke in the first place?

It is. But God also, apparently, invented the caffeine withdrawal headache.

Day Three, I actually remember to ask Chris for a decaf latte in the morning and by noon my head feels like someone’s trying to pry it open with a crowbar. Or hammering it shut. Or some other home-improvement-related simile. I swallow some ibuprofen, crawl to the shower, suffer through a morning meeting.

A question seeps in. Can it really be a change for the better when it causes this much suffering? I draw on my vast medical training to determine that stopping cold turkey might actually be medically unwise. Probably even inadvisable. Perhaps dangerous.

At lunch, I fairly dive into a Diet Coke. The headache subsides but, still, now I’m at Failure by Choice.

For the next couple of days, I try. I do try. I don’t have any caffeine on Day Four and the headache persists. I tell myself it’s really because Chris has given me his stupid cold. It’s important that, whatever has to happen here, he be made culpable in some way.

Only, then we’re flying home on Day Five and I’m all proud of myself and certain that the lack of caffeine in my system is going to make for a smoother journey. But it doesn’t. The flight is bumpy and uncomfortable and I feel jittery and anxious the whole time. Jittery and anxious AND I have a giant headache.

As we’re bumping our way somewhere over the middle of our fine nation, I honestly cannot remember why I stopped drinking caffeine in the first place. Whose stupid idea was this? What kind of change is that, anyway? Not a good change. A dumb change. A change not even worth doing.

And so when we’re back at home and Chris brings me a cup of coffee in bed on the morning of Day Six, I know perfectly well what it is and that I’m not supposed to be drinking it. But I do. I do! This is Failure by Rationalizing. Still, I drink the whole thing, sheepishly and guiltily and think what an awful, awful blogger and changer this makes me.

It’s a terrible feeling, knowing that by the time Day Seven rolls around, I’ve just given up completely. It’s only the seventh week of this project and already I’ve lost resolve so quickly? I suck at changing. My all-or-nothing thinking kicks in and within a few minutes, I’ve given up on the whole project, shut down the blog, and slinked (slunk?) away from my modest  but faithful (and morally superior) group of readers, filled with shame and self-loathing.

Or, at least, mentally I did.

In reality, I decided to borrow from last week and try letting it go. After all, I did make my bed that morning, so I couldn’t say that nothing good was coming of this experiment. And I’ve been paying an awful lot of lip service to the idea that this is all about willingness and trying and I suppose that includes discovering when I’m not all that willing and when I don’t want to try – even if it’s embarrassing to write about.

It also forces me to look for progress, rather than perfection, and the truth is that I’ve cut way back on my caffeine intake. I’ve become more mindful of it. I’m considering that I may actually learn how to do something in moderation for once in my life. Me! Moderation! If that’s what I get out of this past week, then that would truly be remarkable. Maybe not an epic fail, after all.

#6. Letting it go. Letting it all go.

The question I get asked most about this blog is, “How do you decide what change you’re going to make each week?” (Actually, it’s probably, “You have a blog?” but that doesn’t really set up the rest of this entry.) I do have a scribbled master list of ideas that I plan to get to, and I take into consideration what will be particularly challenging – and therefore, I hope, interesting reading – in the week to come. But I’m also becoming increasingly suspicious that the universe is picking for me. A case in point: this week I was toying with the idea of letting it go. You know, it. All of it. Or, as much of it as possible. Letting things roll off my back, going with the flow, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, doing the opposite of what I usually do, which is let every small transgression, slight (perceived and real), glitch, error, aberration and moment of discomfort burrow under my skin and fester until it drives me to distraction. Obsess about stuff I can’t control and outcomes I can’t do anything about. Replay conversations and confrontations in my head until I’ve hit on just the right thing I should have said/done/thrown.

It was on my list, this “letting go” thing, mostly because I knew that it would be difficult for me. But it didn’t look like it was going to be a terrific amount of fun. Then Wednesday rolled around, the day on which I start each week’s change. And a funny thing happened. Not a funny thing at all, actually. An annoying thing. One of those uncomfortable run-ins you have from time to time with a completely irrational person. The sort of situation where even though you know you’re behaving like a normal human being, the other person’s rude response seems so strong and certain it could make you question your own sanity.

If you were the sort of person who let things like that bother her. If you were the sort of person who would let such a confrontation color her whole outlook, take up miles of precious real estate in her brain for hours, if not days.

But what if, instead, I were the sort of person who didn’t? What if I were the sort of person who let things like this go? Who had the wherewithal and the perspective to know that this situation wasn’t my fault, wasn’t my problem – wasn’t personal?

Apparently, I was about to find out. I stopped just short of shaking my fists at the sky and saying, “You win, universe! You win, dammit!”

Instead, I pretended to let it go. That seemed like a first step. I went about my business as usual, brushing off the concerned inquiries of people who had witnessed the exchange and shrugged like it was no big deal.

One thing this change experiment is teaching me is that there are many, many blurry lines in the sand. Lines that confuse me. In this case, I wasn’t sure where “fake it ‘til you make it” ends and “you’re a big, fat liar” begins. Does it count as letting it go if you’re only pretending? I was straddling that middle ground and trying desperately to find out.

Clearly, letting things go wouldn’t be a change worth pursuing if I weren’t a person who is so deeply affected by things in the first place. I don’t mean to imply I’m impressively sensitive, a delicate flower worthy of your admiration. I mean to imply that I think I lack some very grown-up coping skills. I am the one lying in bed at night obsessing about what I should have said, how I should have reacted. I get so caught up in worrying about things I can’t control that sometimes it’s a wonder I get anything done at all.

So it’s not hard to see how this first confrontation was a bit like baptism by fire. I’d like very much to explain how just pretending to be someone who lets things go proved to be a good start, but I have no idea how that worked, exactly. I just know that I only obsessed about the circumstances for a few hours, and even then I muttered to myself, like a crazy lady, “Let it go. Let it go!”

I had conversations with myself whenever I felt my brain taking a direct path to the place of obsession. I had to soothe myself off the ledge of self-doubt, talk to myself like I was a different person, issue constant reminders that the interaction didn’t matter, that I should just Let It Go.

There’s a distinct possibility it helped. I spent much of my week muttering, “Let it go” under my breath, my new mantra. I intoned it line at the grocery store, in traffic, at home. Maybe it was my imagination, but I could feel something shifting.

As if everyday life were not enough of a test, fate had it that I would be traveling twice that week, once to Iowa for a family event and then less than 24 hours later to Las Vegas for a business trip. Air travel. In airports. Filled with people. Anxious and rude fellow travelers. Snippy, overworked airline employees. Long lines, pointless delays and inexplicable bureaucracy.

In the usual course of travel, it only takes and hour or so of dealing with all this stimuli before Chris pronounces me “done.” I absorb all the annoyances and react, react, react until I blow a fuse and can’t deal, reduced to the upright version of rocking back and forth in the corner.

But on this trip, there would be none of that. Because I had become a person who let things go.

Our first trip took us to Iowa for my mother-in-law’s 80^th birthday party. Family’s always tricky to begin with, balancing everyone’s needs and neuroses, opinions and intentions and big events with lots of details to figure out can really ratchet up the anxiety. It’s precisely the sort of thing that can really send me into a tail spin. Everybody’s invested in outcomes, everyone wants a voice. And me? I like to have a dog in every fight. Sometimes two or three.

So I had to think long and hard about what it would look like to let go of things during the lead-in to this party – which, I should note, really didn’t have much to do with me in the first place. I realized, somewhat sheepishly, that part of my motivation for injecting myself into these sorts of things is so that I feel important, so that I don’t feel invisible. It’s a humbling thing to acknowledge, especially in the face of an event that was, inarguably, not about me.

I decided the best approach was to know my place. Just to be a worker bee. Do as I was told. Try to be of service. Try to help, not hinder. Don’t complicate things unnecessarily. Hang back.

The biggest struggle for me was not injecting myself into every little decision that was being made around me. Did I have an opinion on the centerpieces? How many balloons should be on each table? Which confetti to use and where to put it? Sure. I have an opinion on everything.

Only now I also had a voice inside myself that kept asking: what difference does it really make?

Yes, there was the possibility that things might not turn out exactly as people had planned, but with just the little bit of remove I’d afforded myself, it was easier to know that everything would be fine anyway. Instead of making it about me, I could just to be supportive of other people’s decision. And that, I have to say, was unbelievably liberating. It felt like I suddenly had all this extra space to move around in, to be in.

Except, I’d arrived at another unclear line in the sand. Where does “letting it go” end and “not giving a shit” begin? What stops me from being spineless and voiceless? How do you let go of things but still feel empowered?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week and I’ve decided that it’s choice. I think it’s the difference between being silenced and choosing to be quiet. It’s running triage on all these tiny factors and making a conscious decision about what’s worth worrying about and what isn’t – as opposed to assuming that my input’s crucial to everything – that my perspective is correct and worth fretting over and brow-beating others into submission.

The key seems to be caring without being completely invested, which is a very interesting concept for someone as prone to black-and-white thinking as I am. The goal, I’m guessing, is not to turn into an automaton, but to still feel things without feeling everything. Innnnteresting.

Towards week’s end, after less than 24 hours at home, we traveled again to Las Vegas, a place I don’t exactly love. I don’t drink or smoke or gamble. I don’t like crowds. So it was a really, really good thing that by the time we arrived, I had gotten pretty damn good at letting go of things. My husband Chris commented multiple times during our travels how much he liked this new me, how incredible it was that I was just letting things go and I was humbled (and, yes, slightly annoyed) to realize just how much my behavior can be a burden to him.

I liked the change, too, although I quickly became aware that I still have limits, that this takes a lot of effort and a lot of practice. After a day or so of wandering around our hotel-casino, blinded by the lights, dodging weaving drunks and clouds of cigarette smoke, I found myself wondering when the week would be over. When I could finally react to all of this and just throw a good, old fashioned tantrum.

Right before going to sleep on the last night of this experiment, Chris threw an arm around me, closed his eyes and murmured, “Maybe this change will stick.”

Huh. Despite a whopping seven days of effort, my initial reaction was to take that as an insult, an editorial comment on what how awful I usually am. It’s still so deeply ingrained in me to get defensive and react, start a fight and make him feel bad about judging me.

Instead, I didn’t say anything. Maybe I was just too tired or maybe this change is actually taking hold. Either way, what I did was, I just let it go.

See how easy that was? I just let it go.

A little something fun, BBC-style

About a week or so ago, I was contacted by the BBC. This happens to me a lot, as you can probably guess. They're always wanting to interview me about this, feature me about that. They want to know all my thoughts, trail my every move. It can get tiresome, you know? But this time, they wanted to talk to me about my blog. This blog. Actually, they wanted me to tape myself talking to myself about myself and my blog for their Blogworld website. This wasn't nearly as random an occurrence as one might think; a little birdie told a mutual friend at the BBC about this new experiment and they contacted me.

Monday, this little segment went live on the BBC website and the fact that I'm sharing it here at all speaks to the success of this past week's change -- which you'll read about Friday. Normally, I'd be far too worried about what a GIANT DORK I came across as to ever voluntarily share this. But people change, or so I seem hell-bent on proving.

Thus, I'll also note that this little piece ran Monday on BBC TV and radio in Europe. In fact, a friend in Helsinki happened to have her TV on Monday and lo and behold, there was my face! Imagine her shock. No, really. Try. Imagine.

#5. Meditating

To be honest, that whole experiment I did before – the one where I tried to reconnect with people – was just entirely too much work. By the time last week rolled around, I was jonesing for something that would involve a little less effort. A little less reaching out. Something a bit more…insular. I picked meditation. I know, I know. My thinking that this would be a piece of cake was nothing short of ridiculous.

I’ve meditated before. At least two or three times and, I confess, it baffles me. But I’m enough of a sucker, enough of a wanna-be, that a part of me would like to be a person who meditates. It just sounds so … sophisticated. So with it. So Zen.

On day one of Meditation Week, one of my best and oldest friends comes into town. Initially, that seems to be a great excuse to really half-ass it. Maybe even quarter-ass it. Except, Cathi’s a massage therapist who’s learning energy healing work, so she is annoyingly excited about this whole meditation business.

Me? I just want to get it out of the way, which I’m pretty sure is precisely the mindset you want going into meditation. I can’t express how self conscious I feel excusing myself to go into my bedroom and meditate. I tell Cathi I’ll be back in five minutes.

“You need to do it for at least 15 minutes to see any benefit,” she says. That seems ludicrous. I tell her I’ll be back in five minutes. I pop my head into my husband Chris’ office – directly across the hall from our bedroom – and ask him to come and get me when five minutes is up. I don’t want to spend the whole time watching the clock. That seems like a very meditative way to think. My head is full of ideas about meditation. I’m certain almost none of it is actually valid.

Then I go and sit cross-legged on my bed. Like an idiot. I have no idea what to do. I’ve been told by friends who meditate that there is no wrong way to go about this, which sounds like when people say there’s no such thing as a stupid question. Sure there is. We’ve all been asked them.

I’m probably a minute into my first meditation and I’m stuck. My mind is racing. I can’t help wonder what Cathi’s doing. Is she calling all our friends from college and telling them I’m weird? This doesn’t feel very relaxing.

I decide to watch the snow falling outside, coming down as it is in floaty white chunks. That seems highly meditative. Except the window I’m looking out faces a main road and the snow is falling on some pretty fast-moving traffic. Loud, fast-moving traffic. Not so relaxing. Strike that.

My next trick is to try to pay attention to my breath. I’ve done enough yoga that this should feel familiar to me. The problem is that I’ve worked myself into quite a lather about meditating properly and it’s unwise for a person in such a state – a person who has a history of panic disorder – to pay too close attention to her breathing. Breathing is starting to feel extremely difficult. I might not be getting any air into my lungs. I’m probably dying. Dying from meditation.

At this point, at least 20 minutes must have passed, so I yell out to Chris that he must have forgotten me. A second later, he appears in the doorway, grinning. “I didn’t forget you,” he says. ‘It’s only been four minutes.”

Impossible.

Just to show him, I meditate for another five minutes. That’s right. I spite-meditated. And I have to say, it kind of worked. The second five minutes went much faster than the first. I was starting to see why people said you had to meditate for at least fifteen. Still, I left dust in my wake when my ten minutes were up.

Day two, I decide to multi-task. Since it’s Saturday, I need to get my chakras unblocked and figure I can meditate while I do that. Wait. What? Chakras unblocked? I’ve never done that before. But Cathi tells me my chakras are blocked and, well, she does know me pretty well, so I figure, what the heck.

I lie down on the guest room bed as she does whatever the hell it is energy healers do to unblock one’s chakras. It involves a lot of hand waving. I try to keep my eyes closed, mostly to keep from giggling. When the person you used to chain-smoke and chain-drink with is hovering over you, moving energy around, it’s a little surreal.

But it does make for a very relaxing atmosphere and, as sheepish as this pragmatist may be to admit it, I was pretty open to the experience. With Cathi’s gentle guiding, I breath in and out and feel myself sinking back into the bed. I don’t know what’s happening outside of me, but I feel the rest of me slowing down. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a difference between meditating and trying to fall asleep.

Fortunately, it’s not a problem for me, as falling asleep always takes great effort. But I’d probably encourage borderline narcoleptics not to meditate lying down. Such is the wisdom I’m gathering this week.

Day three, my chakras are cleared and my life is changed completely. Okay, not really. But I’m told things are flowing more smoothly, so I’ll take it. Cathi goes home and I’m left to my own devices. I consider whether it’s cheating or helping to meditate in the place where you’re already the most relaxed. I come down squarely in the latter camp and thus, I decide to meditate during my evening bath. I fill it with relaxing lavender bubbles and climb in. I try to be still. I try to breath. I try not to judge the fact that thoughts keep flying into my brain. My primary thought is this: When will I be finished? I’d rather be reading People. But, then, when wouldn’t I?

I have no idea how long I meditate for, but there’s no denying it’s giving me a sense of calm. Not so much calm that I’m in danger of drowning, but a certain end-of-the-day calm which may or may not be responsible for the fact that I seem to have less trouble falling asleep at night now. The bathtub approach is so successful that, on days four and five, I lather, rinse, repeat. So to speak.

Day six comes and doubt it creeping in. Maybe I’m not actually meditating in the tub. Maybe I’m just bathing. How do you know the difference? I might need some more concrete instruction in the art of meditation, so I decide to turn to that great source of spiritual wisdom: You Tube. And what a wealth of meditation videos there are! Color therapy! Healing meditation! Chakra cleansing meditation! (Good thing I already took care of that!)

I pick one largely at random, mostly because it says it’s an intro video.  The fact that it’s only seven or eight minutes long might have played a role too. The video’s pretty poor quality, just some old dude in a robe sitting on a couch, shot from across the room. His head and shoulders are in the lower half of the frame. The rest is mostly wall. It’s like a hostage video or maybe something a cult leader would leave behind for after the mother ship comes.

Still, I close my eyes and let his sleepy talk wash over me. He seems like a nice guy and all but, damn, it takes almost Herculean effort for me to just be. To sit with my own thoughts and my own self. I try to go with it but, to be honest, the last thing I think before the video ends and he eases me out of my meditation is: Only one more day of this crap left.

So Zen.

On the last day, I have a very, very strong instinct not to meditate. Of course, I think I am waiting for the moment in this whole change experiment when I have a strong instinct to do any of the things I’ve chosen.

I know that if I sit down by myself and try to belch out a few “Om”s, I’ll be done and in front of the TV in four minutes flat. So I pick another video on You Tube.

This one I’m drawn to because the woman recording it is a teacher of Anusara yoga, the type I practice. (And by practice, I mean I haven’t been to class in two months.) This lady is in England and, therefore, has a nice accent. In her video, she comes to sit on a cliff in front of the ocean to meditate. Now, I’ve been to England and I can’t help but wonder if she’s isn’t freezing.

The lady has a lot of things to say about meditating, much of which, I have to admit, I don’t pay too much attention to. She does say it’s good to shower before meditating. Huh. That’s news to me. I haven’t bathed since returning from the gym, so I wonder if I should just throw in the towel. Nonetheless, I stick with it. Turns out I’d rather meditate than shower, which I suppose is good information to have.

There’s a possibility that, on my last day of meditation, once I get started, it doesn’t feel as strange to go with the flow. There’s also a possibility that I spent a fair amount of my meditation time trying to parse the lady’s accent. It says she’s in Cornwall, but doesn’t she sound a little Australian? And I was jolted completely when, about five minutes in, she says, “There is never a moment when God disappears.” What the hell? Where did God come from? Shouldn’t there be a warning label on the meditation?

Still, when it’s over, I’m feeling pretty good about my efforts for the week. I may have been a little calmer, over all. I may have slept better than I did in previous weeks. I may feel, as hard as this is to explain, just a little more open. I’m also quite sure I didn’t work up to enough meditation time to really feel a big  impact, but I feel more comfortable with the idea of it, should I choose to pursue it. Later. Another time. In the future.

If that happens, I think I’ll steer clear of the videos and try not to worry so much about what does or does not constitute meditation. Maybe I’ll return to the part that was the most comfortable to me – meditating in the bathtub. Because I’m not sure it matters if it’s meditation or just bathing. I’m clearly in need of both.

#4. Reconnecting

I’m fond of saying that I don’t like people. It isn’t true. I do like people. Well, some people. And of those people, I like some very much, so in my own special kind of math, it sort of balances out. I also like to isolate. I like to hang out by myself, ignore the phone, ignore my email and not talk to anyone. It’s easily compounded by the fact that I work from home. When my husband goes out of town, I could conceivably go days without talking to another human being. (Also without bathing, but that’s another column entirely.) Even if I force myself to the gym or the grocery store, the human interactions I have are highly superficial and don’t really require much effort on my part, don’t result in any real connection.

Despite all this, I seem to have acquired a fair number of friends over the years. Many of them are scattered around the country, even across the globe. And in the last year or so I’ve become increasingly bad at staying in touch with people, of making the effort to keep relationships alive and current. As a result, I feel like some of my connections and friendships are becoming increasingly tenuous. A distant, shared past can’t hold everything together forever.

According to this PBS website article, “connecting with others is the single most important thing we can do for our happiness.” And that is coming from PBS, which is publicly funded and often very boring, so you know it’s a 100% scientifically sound, true fact.

At the center of my trouble connecting with folk is my deep and abiding hatred of the phone. Not as a gadget or as an invention. I give it high marks on both those counts. I don’t even mind talking on the phone that much if someone calls me. But leave it up to me to pick up the phone and call someone with no agenda other than to check in and catch up and a giant gate slams shut in my mind.

I’d much rather send you an email or a text to firm up lunch plans. If my house were on fire, I'd probably try to text 911. And while it’s easy to hide behind the claim that those methods are more convenient, it’s not really about that for me. It’s just that it seems easier, on some level. It seems to require less of me. And I really, really like to give less.

When it comes to staying connected in the laziest way possible, I consider Facebook either a blessing or a curse. Probably both. It’s true that I am “connected” now to far more people than I was before I signed up, but only in the most superficial way. Why on earth would I need to have a meaningful conversation with someone when I could just read their status updates? It’s like having a whole site that reinforces my instincts for only surface, minimal interactions. Awesome.

Facebook’s message and instant chat features have allowed me to slack off even further on my email correspondence. I used to give good email like nobody’s business. Now that seems unnecessarily lengthy.

So I decided to spend the past seven days trying to reconnect with people. Trying to make a conscious effort to reach out and be in touch. The problem with a change like this, it turns out, is that it’s pretty amorphous. What does it even mean for me to reconnect with people? Is it my own definition? Because, if so, I can define effort very, very loosely.

I decided I'd just go about my week being mindful of opportunities to connect or reconnect, as opposed to setting concrete goals, i.e., three calls a day, four. I figured it was either a totally zen approach or a massive cheat. Meh. Either way.

I must admit, even that approach was hard for me. So hard that I managed to put off making any phone calls at all that first day. (This seems to be a habit with me. Perhaps this should be about pursuing change for 5 or 6 days in a row. Clearly, 7 is a stretch.) I told myself I was just warming up, easing my way into some dialing. But even I don't buy my own bullshit, so I kicked off day two by tackling the big stuff: my relatives in Scotland. An email to my uncle (who cannot talk on the phone due to recent cancer treatment) to catch up: BAM! A phone call to my Grandma to hear at great length about the weather in Glasgow: BOOM!

It was a piece of cake. That is to say, it was easy. Well. That is to say, it was simple. But I am embarrassed to say how much effort it took to start this process. You would have thought I was being asked to rewire a phone, not merely pick it up and dial. And this is when I love the people involved. Imagine if I were required to stay in touch with people I didn’t even like!

The thing was, as much as I hate to admit it, a certain momentum did kick in. After calling Scotland, it wasn't all that hard to call a friend here in town, someone I hadn't seen for months, and set up a date for the weekend. It wasn't all that hard to call another one just to check in. In fact, I felt sheepish about how much I’d dragged my heels. I was on a tear. I called friends in St. Louis, friends in Ann Arbor, friends in Texas, all of whom I'm sure spent the first part of our phone calls bracing themselves for whatever momentous, terrible news must have prompted my calling. I imagine they didn't fully exhale until we'd hung up and the call was over. I bet some of them never knew what hit them.

And a funny thing happened. It was like the universe put out some sort of “open for business sign” because when I was signed on to Facebook this week, I got instant messages from friends I hadn’t talked to in months or, in some cases, years. A friend from college who I haven’t spoken with since the dawn of time started an IM chat. Another pal from California zinged a quick hello and check-in my way.

I had to admit, albeit reluctantly, that it felt kind of nice. People seemed generally glad to hear from me or, at the least, excelled at pretending as though my voice from out of the blue wasn’t a huge intrusion. And it was really good for me to remember that I have friends because that knowledge can sort of escape you when you’re a shut-in.

All of which is not to say that I am not relieved that the week has now come to an end. It was difficult for me to step outside my comfort zone. I swear I was more tired the past seven days because of the sheer exhaustion of dialing. All that pressing of buttons! All that talking! Inhale, exhale, speak, pause, question, answer.

I can see there is tremendous value in staying connected, so I’d have to say that while I wasn't convinced of this at the outset, making those calls, having those conversations was a change for the better. As to how I’ll incorporate that knowledge going forward, I’m unsure. I’d like to say I’m changed, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Today, I haven’t made a single phone call but that, I’m telling myself, is because I have the perfect excuse: one of my oldest, best friends is here in Ann Arbor. I haven’t seen her in a couple of years and I couldn’t tell you the last time we had this sort of unmolested stretch of time to chat and catch up and enjoy each other’s company. The way I figure it, that sort of trumps any need to pick up the phone. Right?

Right?

#3: Vegetarianisming

If it wasn’t for the whole “no meat” thing, I’d have been a vegetarian so many times by now. I’d have been one in high school, to fit in or to stand out or maybe just to piss my parents off and garner a little attention. I’d have been one in college to try to fit in with the hippie, theater-types I thought I was going to be palling around with (I was wrong, it turned out – meat-eating media geek misfits all the way!) I would have been one to make boys like me, to make people think I was cool, to give the illusion of being a person passionate about health/the earth/politics/chickens/anything at all.

I have a lot of vegetarian friends, which proves how evolved I am. Of course, I also have a number of pseudo-vegetarian friends. You know what I mean. I’m a vegetarian, but I eat fish. I’m a vegetarian, but I eat turkey. I’m a vegetarian, but I eat steak. As though the “veg” part of “vegetarian” leaves a lot of wiggle room. It’s kind of like a person being “sort of” sober. You either are or you aren’t.

I feel qualified to make such judgments about these things because it is precisely that kind of commitment to an absolute ideal that has ultimately kept me from seriously considering being vegetarian. Well, that and the meat.

That said, I’m not sure carnivores would come out to bat for me. I’m not a particularly good meat person. I only manage to pass because I operate with a highly evolved sense of denial about handling and eating flesh. I’m grossed out by a lot of meats, including all organ meats and anything too fatty, too pink or too … meaty. I’m extremely squeamish about handling raw meat, cutting it or prepping it. And I simply can’t have anything to do with meat on the bone. I prefer to pretend that my chicken breast or fish filet was just created that way – faceless, body-less, boneless, delicious.

This is, at least philosophically, a problem for me. I believe that we should all be more invested in where our food comes from. I heard them talk about it on NPR, so therefore I know it’s a good idea. I also really, really like the idea of telling people I take ownership over the food I consume. I like the idea of taking responsibility for the environmental impact of the food I consume, the amount of energy it takes to raise and transport it and have it land on my table. I mean, doesn’t that just make me sound like a better person?

Thank goodness there is such a vast chasm – at least in my world – between ideals and reality. I heard a story on the radio (yes, public radio) about a guy who decided that if he was going to eat meat, he should be willing to go the distance. So he decided to raise his own cow, slaughter it himself, then eat it. I can tell you right now that if it were on me to raise or hunt animals, slaughter them and get all up in their innards, I would be a vegetarian so fast it would make your head spin.

I am not entirely without action on this front before now. I’ve made a marginal effort in recent years to eat more food produced locally, a task I find much easier during the warmer months. Do you have any idea what I would have to subsist on if I ate only Michigan-grown foods in winter? I’d spend three months sucking on frozen root veggies.

For those keeping score at home, I have actually made some effort in recent years to eating locally, which is made easier by our farmer’s market in warmer months. And I have, in the past couple of years, made a genuine effort to cut down on my meat consumption, inspired as much by my most recent cholesterol test results as by my increasing guilt over the impact meat has on the environment.

I read somewhere that if we all stopped eating meat for just one day a week, it would patch up the hole in the ozone layer in less than a month. Okay, so maybe I made that up, but apparently the impact would be substantial. And good.

All that said, I’m not sure I could really commit to becoming a vegetarian. But being a vegetarian for seven days? Even I could manage that.

Then it occurred to me that there was a complicating factor. During four of the seven days in question, I’d be in Texas. Texas! A state where the steaks are as big as your head and barbecue is a national treasure. Thank God for Austin, which is just teeming with vegetarians and other crazy types.

(Side note: I recognized that I got a real swell of pride when I made my decision for this week’s change. It seems that feeling like a martyr plays a bigger role than I’d like in this little experiment. Look at me, eating vegetarian in TEXAS. Look at HOW COMMITTED I am. I find myself wondering if it’s really a change for the better if all it does is feed your ego? I’m thinking not.)

I would like to say that going meatless in Austin was a transformative experience, but the truth is that it just wasn’t that much of a challenge. It turns out it’s pretty easy to make this sort of change when you’re on the road, eating out in a place where beans and rice abound. Breakfast tacos filled with potatoes and egg. Burritos stuffed with black beans, cilantro and rice. Enchiladas bubbling with cheese, spinach and mushroom. Chips and salsa, guacamole. Home-made warm tortillas.

It was, for the most part, a piece of cake. Not just cake, but pie and ice cream and candy and pancakes. It turns out that the world is full of really delicious, totally unhealthy, non-meat-centric things to consume, and that really takes the sting out of not being able to order the chicken fajitas.

I should also note that both Chris and I had some sort of mild stomach annoyance while in Texas. Nothing major, but enough to pare back our usual foodthusiasm. It’s fair to say that I might have pouted my way through dinner at one of Austin’s finer barbecue joints if either of us had felt up to checking them out in the first place.

The main challenge came at home, on the last two days of my week as a vegetarian. As much as I like to think I reduce my meat intake, a lot of the recipes I make are meat-centric. My go-to quick dinners at the end of a busy day involve fish or a pre-cooked chicken picked up from the store on the way home. I had to step outside of the box, think of new strategies for getting enough protein and veggies and producing something we might actually eat.

Ultimately, it felt good to be making food that didn’t involve meat, although I wasn’t quite sure why. Because I knew it was better for me? Because I felt I was reducing my carbon footprint with my bowl of pasta? Because I felt somehow more virtuous than those awful meat-eaters?

I think that sort of confusion about my motives helped me understand why I’m not a vegetarian at this point in my life. It isn’t just because I do like me some meat. It’s because, in order to do this I think you have to have a reason for making the commitment, a passion that drives you, whether it’s a love of animals, a passion about health or a staunch commitment to the environment.

I learned this week that I don’t feel that way. I also learned that I can go days without eating meat, that I don’t need it and that I feel good – for whatever reason – when I’m cutting back. Maybe my initial goal of eating vegetarian two days a week needs to be reversed and I should try to only eat meat two days a week. Or maybe I just need to be more mindful of my meat consumption, what kind and where it comes from. Either way, I know now that I can do it. I’m not sure I knew that this time last week.

#2: Praying

I wanted to start this entry with the words: “I’m not a pray-er.” Only, it isn’t true. In fact, I do pray. Not often and not well, and I am extremely uncomfortable saying (or, in this case, writing) it. Because to say that one prays is loaded, invites all sort of assumptions and judgments. I’m afraid of what other people will think of me. Mostly, I think --coming from a family that worshipped at the church of atheist intellectualism -- I’m worried about what I’ll think of me. I’m not just uncomfortable writing or talking about my prayer life, such as it is. I’m also deeply uncomfortable doing it. Which begs the question: why bother? And what does that have to do with seven days of change?

Let me back up a tad. As I said before, my parents rejected outright organized religion and all its trappings and trickery. We valued knowledge and facts and scorned those who relied on this silly notion of a God. Thus, the only praying I did growing up was the foxhole variety that, interestingly enough, seem to be ingrained in our brains from birth. Dear God, don’t let me get caught. Dear God, don’t let that be the last piece of cake. Dear God, help me pass this test. Dear God, let that boy ask me out. Dear God, are you there? It’s me, Julia.

If I got the outcome I sought, I took it for granted. If I didn’t – which was most of the time, given the unlikelihood of the things I prayed for – I took it as further proof there was no God and that prayer was bunk. That approach, while frustrating and confusing, got me through most of my adolescence and young adulthood.

It’s impossible for me to talk about my prayer life without talking about my recovery from alcoholism, but I feel self conscious about that. I’m painfully aware how annoying it can be, how much it can alienate some readers. But it’s essential here, so if it makes you uncomfortable, I get it. If it makes you roll your eyes and think you’re stuck in a Lifetime Movie of the Week, I understand.  Maybe you’ll come back next week for something a little less personal.

I got sober with a popular, highly anonymous 12-step recovery organization that happens to be pretty big on the whole God thing. It wasn’t easy for me to gel with at the start,  and it's still something I struggle with – but desperate people are willing to try an awful lot of things.  And, fortunately, there are workarounds for the “God” concept. You get some pretty wide berth to figure out what your higher power might be – anything from a coffee cup to the group itself to a gen-yoo-ine beard-havin’ Jesus figure.

But then there’s prayer, tons of it. Meetings begin and often end with the serenity prayer or, sometimes, the Lord’s prayer. Certain steps require prayer work to complete them. So I did what I was told, reluctantly and not without resentment, trying it all on for size. It was like an ill-fitting and really itchy sweater. I was simply going through the motions. I could say the words they told me to, but I didn’t feel connected to anything. I felt like I was the world's biggest faker and it was only a matter of time before people found out how spiritually retarded I really was. I coasted like that for about seven years.

Then along came my friend M., the woman who taught me most of what I know about prayer. The best part? She's an atheist. And when an atheist tells you that she prays and experiences the benefits, it's tough to make your own arguments hold water. But I had questions. Oh, did I have questions! How, I wanted to know, do you possibly pray if you don’t believe in God? Who in the heck are you praying to? Infuriatingly, M. merely shrugged and asked me what difference that really made.

I thought it was a trick question. But then M. explained to me that, for her, prayer is just a good way to pause and take a moment to order her thinking at the day's start -- or to give thanks at its  end. A "recovering Catholic," she told me she even says the rosary from time to time because the ritual is comforting to her and she believes in the sanctity of words. (I had to admit that, as a writer, that latter part in particular made sense to me.)

I began to warm to the idea that maybe what mattered was not who or what I prayed to, how I prayed or even the words I said, but that I prayed. That the act itself could bring me calm and comfort and order and humility.

I would never have predicted how much freedom that revelation gave me to try and figure the rest out for myself, to find a way to try to make prayer a genuine experience for me.  It would have all worked swimmingly had it not been for my brain, which made me feel ridiculous about praying. It argued with me. Mocked me. Cajoled me. The result was a prayer life that was half-assed at best. I prayed occasionally, self-consciously and, often, resenting the feeling that I “had” to do it.

I’d probably have chucked the whole idea out the window, frankly, were it not for the fact that the people I admire most in recovery are sane, funny, grounded, intellectual types who also happen to extol the value of daily prayer. All of which is a very, very long intro to why I decided to follow their lead and pray for seven days in a row. I mean, really try. Morning and night. On my knees, even. Would that be enough to make a difference?

The first day, I forgot, entirely.

But by day two I was back on the wagon, so to speak, begrudgingly getting down on my knees and giving it a whirl.  I still felt ridiculous. I didn’t know what to say. On my knees by my bedside, I automatically started by saying (in my head), a beseeching, “God?” and then realized it was just like the beginning of Madonna’s Like a Prayer. Clearly, I had trouble focusing. I clung to that hope that acknowledging I didn’t know what to say and humbling myself with getting on my knees would earn me some credit.

After a couple of days, the "on your knees" bit was starting to feel a tad wholesome, maybe even martyr-ly. And there was no arguing that it forced me to stop. Or try to stop. Even if I wasn’t entirely successful, I could get in a few deep breaths and a fleeting sense of being in the moment and being entirely okay in that space. Maybe the gift in this was that pause, that space in which to ask for help and give thanks. To whom or what, I didn’t know, but somehow that didn't seem to matter.  It felt important just to be exercising my humility and gratitude muscles?

On the last day of this little experiment, I flew to Texas. I am not, as I have noted elsewhere, the world’s best flyer. It’s not just the fear of dying, although that has a hefty hand in matters. It’s also that I have some sort of strange, almost neural, physical reaction to the motions of flying. The minute the plane starts to move – even when it’s on the ground – the nerve endings in my arms and legs spring to life, making me anxious and prickly. It’s a sensation that’s magnified by the bumps and sways of take-offs and landings.

At some point over the years, it has become an unconscious ritual to grab for my husband’s hand when the plane revs up the runway and say a prayer. So, just like that, as the plane tucked its wheels and we took to the sky, I found myself praying. I was asking for help. Asking to have this discomfort removed from me. Asking for acceptance of the fact that it was out of my hands. I was asking, if somewhat sheepishly, for a good outcome, a safe delivery.

At that moment, when the praying was automatic, I wasn’t concerned about to whom or what I was praying or where said thoughts and words are landing. I just felt the need to get them out there, to calm myself with this ritual. By the time we leveled out at our cruising altitude, my nerve endings had quietened a bit and I was able to relax. And whether that was because my prayers allowed me to soothe myself or because they went out in the universe and I received aid in return, I don’t know.

Nor, it turns out, do I really care.

#1: Making the bed

I know a couple of people who are awfully fond of mentioning the fact that they make their beds every single morning. Every. Single. Morning. I know, right? According to these people, the idea is that if they go on to get absolutely nothing else accomplished all day, at least their bed is made. That seems like a pretty low bar for productivity, even by my lax standards. I suspect that what they’re really doing is bragging about their superior housekeeping skills. Their discipline. Their inexplicable sense of pride revolving around a mundane task.

As evidenced by the fact that I consider this all highly suspect, I’ve never been much of a bed maker. I just don’t really see the point. You make a bed, you go about your business, you get back in it. A friend of mine recently commented that making the bed after you get up is a lot like tying your shoes after you take them off. (To be honest, I’m not sure it’s the world’s most solid analogy, but since I don’t like making my bed, I’ll take it.)

I am a woman who loves hotels almost entirely because while you’re out, magical fairies come in and make the bed for you. They make it wrong, to be sure, tucking things in too tightly, posing weird tubular pillows that match no human body part. Still, the bed making falls to someone else. This is, in my opinion, as it should be. If you have to do it yourself, the end result simply doesn't seem worth it.

Yet, a couple of weeks ago, I was soaking in the tub and reading a New York magazine article entitled “50 Steps to Happiness. It included just the sort of worthwhile gems you’d expect, such as eating Greek yogurt or offering to help “a stroller person” up the stairs. (I must confess this sent my brain a-spinning, trying to figure out what the hell a “stroller person” is. Part human, part stroller? Are they a problem in New York?)

The second item on the list, courtesy of The Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin, was this:

“Make your bed. Go figure, but outer order contributes to inner calm. Especially if you’re living in a small space—but even if you’re living in a gigantic loft. Start each day with a concrete, albeit tiny (and therefore manageable!), accomplishment.”

It was a simple enough (manageable!) suggestion, practically daring me to try it. I should be clear that I didn’t really entertain the notion that making my bed would be the key to happiness. But I’ve been wrong before. Once or twice. And I am terribly fond of the shorter, easier path to, well, anything. Perhaps I shouldn’t rule out the possibility entirely. What if it really was that simple? What if a little tug and tuck here and there and happiness was mine?

Or what if, at the very least, it was the key to … something? A sense of satisfaction? A kernel of discipline? A tiny demonstration of willingness? I was looking for a small change to kick off this blog and I figured I’d be hard pressed to find a smaller one that still actually qualified as change. Thus began seven days of bed making. In a row.

That first morning, I fairly leapt out of bed and promptly got to work which, in all fairness, seems a bit of a misnomer for what this really was.  Our bed is a low-key affair. We don’t like the sheets tucked in, use a big duvet rather than layers of blankets, and there isn’t a mess of pointless throw pillows to be arranged. In fact, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between our bed, made and our bed, unmade.

To say it was a bit of a letdown would be an understatement. What did I know? I’m new to this change business. Maybe the reward wasn’t in the making of the bed itself. Maybe it was in the changes, subtle but many, that would creep into my life now that I had started it off with this little exercise in willingness. I sallied forth with my day. Nothing the least bit unusual happened.

The next day, however, something did. After I made my bed that morning, I tackled the pile of clothes that had been accumulating for days over the bottom bed rail. It didn’t really seem like a conscious decision; it’s just that they were interfering with the overall aesthetic effect and I was on a bit of a roll. Perhaps even more significantly, in that pile I came across some gym clothes. Which I put on. And wore. To the gym. What would a scientist make of the connection between these three events? I have no idea. I paid zero attention in science.

By day three, I’ll confess that the novelty was waning. I actually lingered in bed for a while just to avoid having to get up and make it. Which led me to wonder if I couldn’t build a better mouse trap. What if I made the bed without getting up? What if I made the bed from the inside? And so I did. I moved myself over to the middle of the bed and began a complicated set of motions, waving my arms and legs – picture a jumping jack, lying down – and things were acceptably in place. In fact, from my vantage point it looked better than I would have guessed. Then came the tricky part – getting out. I pretended to be as flat and light as a slip of paper and fairly slid right out. I surveyed the bed, with its wrinkles, the bottom corners not quite even, the pull to the right where I had slid out. It wasn’t a perfect system by any means. But it wasn’t terrible.

For those first three or four days, I didn’t really pay attention to just how nice it was to come to a made bed at the end of the day, peel back the covers and crawl inside. It seemed more relaxing. Civilized, even. Maybe Ms. Rubin was onto something in re: outer calm bringing inner calm. I could see that much. I just wasn’t sure it was a habit I’d stick with.

I’m sorry to report that by week’s end, I had abandoned my method of making the bed from the inside. Genius as it was, it was also exhausting. Going back to the traditional method left me a little more energy for the additional straightening I seemed to be doing throughout the day. I’d have to say, very begrudgingly, that there seemed to be a good deal of spillover effect, vis a vis seeking an outer sense of order. It turns out the towels can be picked up off the bathroom floor. Not always, but sometimes. The kitchen counters can be uncluttered on a more regular basis.  I even found myself folding the couch blankies and putting them back in their basket at day’s end. I can really see how that sort of order could be very appealing to a more industrious person.

In the lag between day seven of bed-making and sitting down to hammer out these riveting thoughts, it occurred to me that I haven’t devised any real system of assessing the impact of each change. Was the goal in this first outing to find happiness through housework? If so, my conclusion is that that’s a real stretch. Should I gauge the change’s value based on whether it “stuck” after the week was up?  If so, then the fact that yesterday I absent-mindedly pulled the duvet cover into a pseudo-made position after rising would certainly suggest that I’m off to a swimming start.

The genesis

You know how it goes. It's your first Chinese food of the new year and you crack open the fortune cookie with perhaps a little more anticipation than usual. After all, if you were the sort of person to believe in such things, you might think that whatever's printed on this tiny slip of paper could possibly set the tone for the year ahead. Or, at least, the next few minutes. My fortune read: You will make a change for the better.

I'm not often moved -- or, really, affected at all -- by my fortune. I don't even eat the cookies and by some standards, that renders the powers of one's fortune slip completely moot. But this touched on something I'd been thinking about a lot as 2009 came to a close and January settled in, the idea that some changes were needed in my life. There, in black and white type on that tiny piece of paper, it suddenly seemed such a simple notion. So appropriate for the start of a new year.  So filled with optimism and promise. So ... fitting for someone other than me.

I pondered this fortune. I put it on my desk. I posted it to my Facebook status and then promptly tossed the piece of paper.

There.

That seemed like plenty of change.

But it was the tell-tale heart of fortunes. Even after the trash was taken out, it thumped away inside my brain. For all of January, it nagged me. It didn't help that, as the calendar pages turned to 2010, I was made painfully aware that this is the year I'll turn 40 -- and my life doesn't look much like I hoped it would at this stage. Fine. Whatever. Change might work. Only, I wasn't entirely sure (and still am not) what the change -- or (gulp) changes -- should be.

I am known for quite a few things. I'd venture to guess that  my stick-to-it-ive-ness is not one of those things. I'm probably better known for getting overwhelmed by the mere thought of effort, then retiring to the couch to watch crime shows until my eyes. The very idea of change scares and exhausts me. It's so... big picture. And my all-or-nothing thinking regularly presents me with a lengthy list of past changes I had implemented and promptly abandoned. It was depressing. Downright discouraging.

What if I couldn't come up with a single change that I would implement and stick with forever and ever for the rest of my life?

Then I realized something: I'm the one making the rules here. What if, instead of thinking in terms of Giant and Overwhelming Permanent Change, I thought small. Really small. Really small and temporary. Surely even I could conceive of making a small change for one week. Just seven days in a row. If I did, would it have any impact on me, immediately or long-term? Would my life be completely and totally revolutionized by the most half-assed commitment to self-improvement I could conceive of?

Probably not.

But the experiment, I decided, could prove kind of interesting -- and maybe not just to me. Thus, this new blog. One change for seven days and one blog post summing up the experiment. Ready? Set? CHANGE.