Tag: friends

The Wandering Hermit: The Skunk in the Fog

   9 July 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: The Skunk in the Fog

I’m just going to have to get over it.

This morning’s walk was dark; the sunrises are getting noticeably later and it was pretty foggy.  At first I thought it was absurd to walk in such darkness and I did keep veering off toward the side of the road.  I could take the time to drive to a lit place, and I’ll have to if we are still here in the fall.  I don’t want to give up my early morning walks.

I got a message from someone that they are inspired to go for a walk.  Now, granted, I actually don’t know anything about this person’s fitness levels or needs.  I don’t know if this was an offhand comment or an actual bit of motivation being expressed, but it doesn’t really matter.  What mattered was that it reminded me of how uncomfortable I get when I feel like I’ve influenced someone to do something.  I once had a friend plan an entire vacation based on something I had written, and the whole thing made me very nervous.  There was nothing wrong with that vacation—in fact, I’m extremely flattered by the whole thing.  But something about being a person anyone looks to for information makes me uneasy.  And I do really need to get over that!  

I often put so much pressure on everything that no event, no matter how small, and no interaction, no matter how brief, is insignificant.  Every moment of the day is important.  Every conversation is profound.  It’s one of the ways I get around living in the present.  I’m so busy waiting for the bigness of the moment that I miss that the moment has even happened.

I ran into a skunk this morning.  He was crossing the driveway and we startled one another, but he just kept walking and I let him go on his way.  He was pretty adorable, but I was careful to not make any moves that might make him feel endangered.  It was a reminder of whose bit of land this really is.  

[Walk #117]

The Wandering Hermit: It’s Not Me, It’s You: Rules for Walking

   5 July 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: It’s Not Me, It’s You: Rules for Walking

It isn’t that I mind having company on my morning walks—I don’t.  In fact, I welcome someone joining me while I walk.  But there are some caveats.  

  1. Brian doesn’t talk in the morning.  I’m not cranky or in a bad mood, but the parts of my brain that do the talking aren’t even scheduled to be at work until I’ve been awake for an hour, and they are often running late.  There is a misconception that this means I’m grumpy.  I wake up most days ready to go and with a lot of motivation.  I also don’t want to talk… about anything.
  1. Brian doesn’t want to hear you talk in the morning.  Without the support of the speech staff, the listening staff isn’t really organized and ready yet first thing in the morning.  They hear you, but they cannot give you their full attention.  The morning agenda rarely includes people talking, so they just aren’t sure what to do when it happens.
  1. Brian is not admin.  I’m never admin, but it is especially true when I first wake up.  I cannot solve your problems for you yet.  That takes skills I won’t have until much later in the day, if at all.  I hear you.  You have an issue.  I appreciate that, but I cannot help.
  1. Brian will become cranky if you keep accusing him of being cranky.  We are all different.  My morning process involves quiet for an hour at minimum.  I love the sounds of morning, from birds in the trees to the sound of a coffee maker.  Because I don’t talk, I’m often accused of being cranky as I said.  I’m not; I’m just enjoying the stillness before my day gets going.  However, if asked enough times I will in fact deliver what you are ordering.  And I hate that I become so annoyed, but it just seems like some days I’m wrong for existing the way I am.

None of these caveats negate my interest in exercising with someone else.  I’d love to do that, but maybe what I really require is ground rules.

  1. Speak softly an stay off my back.  A simple greeting or brief discussion is fine.  Get straight to it, but not too loudly.  My tone will be what my tone is.  Again, I don’t mind even if my mouth isn’t working yet.
  1. Have a plan.  The best time to discuss an exercise/walking session is the day before.  Plan what you are going to do, be flexible enough to change things as needed, and be ready to do the thing.  If your mouth is already fully with it, you body should be as well.
  1. Sort it out.  As I mentioned, I’m not admin.  If you headphones are tangled or you are having an issue with your shoes, you might need to figure that out.  And that is okay.  I wouldn’t dream of asking for help with that stuff for myself.
  1. It’s okay to do what it is that you can/want to do.  I walk at least 2 miles in the morning.  I wake up at 5am and I leave the house by 5:30am.  The times vary & the route varies, but if you think it is too far, or not far enough, that’s cool.  Do your own walk if you need to.  I’m happy to walk beside you while it makes sense, but the morning walk/exercise is about your own fitness goals, so we might not sync up precisely.  Don’t worry about that.  And if you’d rather do a different walk, but just at the same time, that’s cool too.  Do that.  Don’t tie your routine to me.  
  1. Post-walk is when I write.  I need about 20 minutes sometime after my walk for logging & blogging.

I think there is a sort of popular way people like to walk and talk.  It’s a nice leisurely stroll through a park and it is very nice.  I’m actually very interested in doing that sort of thing.  It just isn’t the same as my morning walk.  That is about increasing my heart rate, waking up, and enjoying the dawn.  

[Walk #113]

The Wandering Hermit: Justin & the 10-Day Meal Plan Plan

   30 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Justin & the 10-Day Meal Plan Plan

I’m starting to feel a bit better.  I was reluctant to wake up this morning, but I still just did it anyway.  I’ve got some yard work to do this morning, but I think I might try to get some extra sleep this afternoon.  I have a lot to do this week and I want to make sure I’m fully over whatever has been keeping me lethargic lately.

Justin has decided to do a 10 day diet.  He wants to start on the first.  I think that’s great for him.  He struggles with the permanence of a new way of eating, but he knows he can handle a 10-day diet.  And when that’s over, I think he’ll give himself a few days to go back to normal and then he might resume the 10-day plan as a more permanent situation.  I had been trying to help him do some planning that included all of the things he likes, but that wasn’t working.  He found creative ways to go around the plan and sneak in hundreds of unaccounted calories.  He needs something far more strict.  He is also working uphill a little since one of his medications causes weight gain.  It used to be easy for him to stay thin.  Now he has to work at it, and I think adjusting to that is frustrating.  I totally understand that.  Since he’s doing something strict, I’ll probably be tightening up my own eating for the month.  And I love that.  I’ve gotten a little lazy about food; I’m still basically eating the same way, but I’ve found myself forgetting to record things.  Part of that is that I had started using Cronometer, but I’m back to writing everything down.  I am far more mindful about my diet when I’ve written it all down as I eat it.  Cronometer is a great tool and I still use it for planning out Justin’s meals for the week, but for myself it quickly became a crutch and an excuse.

[Walk #106]

The Wandering Hermit: Lightning Bugs & Guilt

   16 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Lightning Bugs & Guilt

I have a lot of guilt related to Dad.  When I first came to Oklahoma from Alaska, I was in decent enough shape.  I had spent a few years in a retail job where I sat down most of the day, but I still needed to be able to be active.  The first few years, I was able to do a lot of things, from planting a garden that failed to mowing the lawn every week to grocery shopping.  But my health was negatively affected by a cut I got that became infected and I let it be the excuse that let me stop being active and gain a lot of weight.  And when I was just starting to recover from the worst of it, Mom passed and that sent me into a long depression.  And it was doing the same for Dad, only 300 ft away in his own house, but he might as well have been halfway around the world.  It’s true: everyone grieves alone.  When Dad’s health started to decline, and he was diagnosed with cancer, I was a very sick person.  I had no business helping to take care of someone else when I could barely take care of myself.  Dad wanted me around more, but it was hard to walk and hard to get down the steps.  It took a lot out of me to go up to his house that I limited those trips, which understandably bothered him.  I had not yet identified myself as the problem.  My nephew had, and I know he had a lot of issues regarding me.  I can’t blame him; he was correct.  I just wasn’t ready to hear him.  I could have made the changes I needed to make to help out more—help out better.  Would that have meant Dad would still be here?  Probably not.  He died of issues stemming from his cancer, and I doubt I could have lost enough weight to make his cancer go away.  But I could have been there more, and I do feel a lot of guilt about that.

I wanted so much to get my walk in this morning before 6:00am.  It was an arbitrary goal, but I did make it.  And that was including my ridiculous distraction trying to get a good video of lightning bugs.  I’m convinced they know when they are being recorded; they would all be lighting up in chorus, but as soon as I touched the red button there was darkness, except for one slowly blinking—a crumb for me.  That took me out of my walk enthusiasm initially, but I had only just started, so I was able to pick it back up an finished at 5:59am.

My legs are noticeably smaller than they used to be, but plagued by issues.  I think they have a tendency to respond negatively to hormonal changes.  Some days, they’ll be just covered in rashes or in pimples or they’ll be dried out.  I never know what kind of day it’ll be with my legs, and I’m really interested in not thinking about them all the time.  I don’t know if that will ever be my reality, but I would love that.

I’ve been making my housemate Justin’s meal plans, and it’s going fairly well.  He’s not 100% in it, as he still will add this or that to the day, which is honestly fine, but he’s definitely the type to give himself permission for a big thing since he was allowed a small thing.  It’s a different thing doing his meal planning because he thinks of himself as being on a diet which will eventually end.  I’m trying my hardest to make it so sustainable for him that he won’t want to stop, but he does love fast food french fries and if I don’t work them into a meal plan he will just end up eating them anyway.  For next week, I will try to incorporate that.  What I am trying to stress to him is that he can eat whatever he wants, but he needs to track that.  If he wants to mindlessly eat, he needs to eat a different way.  It’s perfectly fine to do that as well, but fast food is not on that plan.

Dad didn’t understand nutrition, and probably intentionally.  I never saw him as old, but he seemed to start thinking of himself that way.  He was never good at eating healthy foods honestly, but in the last few years he seemed to think it no longer mattered what he ate.  He was happy to just eat all the junk food and did.  But that also isn’t exactly true.  While Dad’s actions indicated a sort of indifference to his own life, as well as his frequent statement “I’m ready to go see your mama,” during his first meeting with the oncologist at the VA, things we very different.  It was August 2022, and he had just received the cancer diagnosis.  When we went into the meeting, I fully expected him to not want to fight, but he told the doctor he wanted to live and wanted to do whatever necessary to treat it.  Lifestyle changes are hard, and I was hard on him during those last few months.  But I also wanted him to live.  In the end, he couldn’t outrun cancer like he had hoped.  In the end, it didn’t matter if he had gorged himself on étouffée and apple pies.  But I can’t help but wonder how things might have been different if I had lost this weight ten years ago.  Would my parents have tried out my way of eating?  Would they have been healthier as a result, or was it just too late to turn back the clock?  There are so many things we can never know.

[Walk #91]

The Wandering Hermit: Geri & The Economy

   7 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Geri & The Economy

It was an absolutely perfect morning for a nice walk.  That said, I did have some trouble getting going.  I actually woke up thinking I might just do indoor aerobics today, which would honestly not be a bad idea, but I’m not sure it needs to replace a morning walk, so I told myself as much and decided that if I was going to do aerobics today, I needed to get in one mile as well.  That was all just fine until I had walked about half a mile, at which time I was warmed up and decided to get both miles in anyway.  And that was a good decision.  The temperature was excellent.

Brad texted me last night; Geri, a friend of mine is in the hospital.  He says she has pneumonia and a shattered wrist.  I’d like more details, but I worry about her; I’ve always worried about her.  I worked with her when I was in high school, and we attended the same church congregation.  My brother Brad eventually married into a family that she was also married into, so he gets updates on the goings-on as part of updates about his ex-wife’s (and now his children’s) family.  I need to go visit. 

I’m increasingly eager to get moved, to move on, to find a new place and way of being.  This will sound like I’m being down on myself, but I don’t think that’s the case.  It’s been so long since I had money that I don’t even understand what to do with it.  Whenever I see other people out and about, my first thought tends to hinge on that person’s relative financial security compared to mine.  And I think I sometimes get frustrated with people who talk about how bad things are for them and their families, especially when they have a home, they have food, access to clean water, the ability to buy essentials, and usually they have a car and a smartphone and spend a bit of money dining out.  I’m not saying they shouldn’t have any of the things they have or not spend money the way they want to spend it.  But I do think we have such a comfortable situation that people have started to mistake a reduction in comfort as discomfort.  It just isn’t.  Not having the excess you once did is probably just fine.  I’m also not really saying that I have it bad.  I don’t have an income, but I do get a small amount of money through some passive means and even I have a smartphone, a home, food, access to clear water, and the ability to buy the essentials.  I just don’t live under the delusion that I am living in poverty.  

[Walk #82] 

Mindful Musings: Their Ecosystem

While I was doing my meditation, I kept getting the thought in my head: “This is their ecosystem, this is their ecosystem, this is their ecosystem….”  On and on and on…. I know it seems a little cliché and silly, but it did come out of my own head.  I feel that way a lot living where I do, plopped like a bag of sand in the middle of so many creatures homes; their ancestral lands.