Doing My Best

The day is new and I am out walking my dog on the property. The grass in the field has grown tall, and everything is green and growing. I am so grateful for these morning walks with Jay. Religiously every morning I take my prune juice, sit on the toilet, floss and brush my teeth, wash my face, take my morning pills, put on my Fitbit, and put on my shoes and head out for a walk with the dog. Sometimes I am out there by 7:30am and sometimes not until 9:30am. Today it was early. The day before me awaits. I am choosing to stay home from Quaker meeting this morning, so I can get started on assembling my new compost structure. Yesterday I cleared the roses from an eight by eight patch of land. Today I will roll the pallets down the path, assemble them and tie them together. I plan to mow, and it will be nice to have a fresh bin to dump the grass clippings into.

Planning and accomplishing such a big task on my own takes planning. I tire easily, and I can overdo it so easily as well. My family is a herd of hard workers. The other day, my Dad came over to help me pull weeds, some sorrel, from the gravel along the front of my house house. I lasted about a half an hour on my hands and knees pulling these weeds. My dad, 82, continued for another hour, and my mom, 77, came to help. They finished the length of the house then continued on around the front and did more, just sitting in the gravel and working away. I am proud to have such able and healthy parents. Being overweight, a smoker, and on so many meds, makes it hard for me to keep up. I still consider myself active, and healthy to a degree.

Friday I went back to the gym. It has been several months since I have renewed my membership. There too, I have a history of overdoing it. I used to work out for an hour and a half, and this would wreck me for the rest of the day. Friday, I did the weights circuit, and I am going to focus more on this type of exercise. In the past I have mostly focused on cardio. Saturday I did not do weights, but I did some core exercises, crunches and leg lifts, and spent some time on the treadmill and the rowing machine. My goals are to stay active and strengthen my body. I am keeping my workouts to forty-five minutes and this feels doable. I am actually able to listen to my body. Not drinking any caffeine helps with this. In the past I would drink tons of coffee to counteract my meds, and head to the gym in full force. Friday, after doing a full weight training circuit, having been at the gym for forty five minutes, I could hear my body say, “I think that is enough”. I had this experience swimming in the Puget Sound on Mothers’ Day as well. I was swimming for just over a half an hour, and the water is very cold. I felt my body tell me that it was time to swim to shore. I’m glad I got out when I did, because later that evening I struggled with being extremely cold, a delayed effect that often happens after you deplete your core temp so severely.

Learning to listen to my body tell me when I have done enough is important. I may be measuring up less than what I wish I could, but that is okay. When I was weeding in the gravel on my knees, my knee that I have issues with was telling me that it had enough. Luckily, my Dad was extremely supportive. I am just glad I made it as long as I did. I don’t doubt that being caffeine free is helping me be in tune with my body. I am grateful for that. I may still struggle with nicotine/tobacco, and some food addictions, but not drinking alcohol and caffeine is a good start. The caffeine especially gave me a false sense of energy, and I would often go overboard and burn out. Little steps day by day is much better. I am doing that with my diet as well. I try to make an adult healthy choice at least seven out of ten times. It is not always easy. My last attempt to quit smoking, I put on ten pounds. I’m happy that it was not more. I struggle with the side effect of weight gain from several of my medications, but mostly the olansapine, an antipsychotic. I am very grateful to this medication, because it really works and I am now very grounded in reality because of it. So I do my best to be ‘on' as little else as possible.

“Easy does it”, and “one day at a time”, are colloquialisms from the recovery meetings I attend. Sometimes it is amazing how much wisdom can be taken from such a small and simple phrase. It can be amazing how difficult it is to ascribe to something that seems ultra simplified. I can tell myself that I live by these principles, but it takes mediation and focus, writing about it, and praying about it, to actually live it out. But it is possible to learn from such wisdom. Maybe less truly is more, and good enough is best. I try to mellow and accept myself every day. I do daily gratitude and affirmation lists, and I stop and reflect on my life often. Life is too short to waste it trying to achieve the unachievable. Here I am, right now, doing the best that I can.