The Wandering Hermit: One Shoulder for the Past & One Shoulder for the Future

Brian 10 June 2024 Leave a Comment

I suspect that this is not sustainable, waking up daily and having to choose to not be frustrated by the absolutely frustrating things around me. For now, I’m managing to reset and refocus each morning, but I imagine I’ll either not be able to do that forever or the frustrating things will have to stop. I’m not sure which.

I do actually feel amazing today, but part of that is related to my acknowledgment that I don’t actually owe anyone anything. There are several situations in my life recently in which others are attempting–unintentionally–to obligate me into participation in their lives and in their situations. I’m trying to find the lines and the balance between caring for the needs of those I love and taking care of my own life. I spent ten years being the person my parents needed to be. That was my choice. I don’t want to complain about that because I value the time I spent with them, but I have a choice in these other situations. I think it is easy to look at the past decade and assume that since I was able to put myself on pause for Mom & Dad, then I must just be a person who will do that for anyone. I do want the best for everyone, but I’m starting to realize that they don’t always even consider what the best for me looks like.

This is all vague, but it is important to my journey of self-actualization that started with my need to buy clothes that would fit my body. It started with weight; it did not end with weight, and I don’t see myself giving up on finding ways to improve myself and achieve a life that is as fulfilling to me as I deserve.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time packing up things at my parents’ house. I could see some big issues with my thought processes during packing, but I’m trying to be patient with myself about them. One is my absolute desire to get back to creating art. I love it, but the craft room was a room I shared with Mom and it made me sad to go back in there after she died, so I have spent years just wishing I would get back to it. I packed up a lot of tools I’m looking forward to playing with. The other was an issue plaguing me lately, and it sometimes causes me a bit of existential dread that I’m not sure how to handle. I don’t have children. I’m perfectly okay with that, but I want our family to carry on into the future. I think my niblings will eventually care about some things, but all of them are so young that they don’t seem invested in their own pasts. That’s understandable; I certainly wasn’t at their age. What worries me is how to carry that legacy forward until they are ready. A lot of people pass down the debris of the lives of their ancestor and my family is no different. I have some of my great grandma McGuire’s pitcher collection, my second great grandpa Fuchs’ Bible, my grandpa Tucker’s pocket watches, my mom’s diaries. But the list goes on and on. My dad was a hoarder, and really the message I internalized was that severing oneself from the items of a loved one is disrespectful. That thing was important to someone who is important to you, so keep it. Keep everything. Keep the photos, keep the quilts, keep the sugar dispenser, keep the wooden spoons, keep the emergency sewing kit, keep the receipts from 1972, keep the unopened mail from 1998. And I realized when I was packing up everything to put it all in storage yesterday that I don’t want it.

Now, this is a realization I have been having over and over and over. Typically it ends in me distracting myself into not thinking about it too deeply. I have used it to get rid of massive amounts of stuff, but often with especially well-loved things I stop and think those things need to be preserved. For whom? That’s the wall I keep coming to. I love learning about my family. I might love knowing that my second great grandma Spencer had a book that she loved a great deal, but that does not mean I would want to have her copy with me for the rest of my life.

People are not the sum of their acquisitions. I think about the people I’ve lost a lot more in organic ways than I ever do because I saw a ceramic tortoise or a coin purse full of newspaper clippings. I have no obligation to shoulder the people I will spend my future with, but equally I have no obligation to shoulder the lives of the people I miss from the past. My Mimi doesn’t exist in her Santas, and I don’t have to find a space for them.

[Walk #85]

The Wandering Hermit: A Skinny Legend & His Twenty Year Old Pants

Brian 8 June 2024 Leave a Comment

I woke up a little early this morning, but ready to go! Whereas yesterday morning was full of dread about my walk, today I was itching to get out the door and on my way. I might have done extra as well, but I do have a small blister on one toe and it started to bother me a little after a couple of miles. I probably need better shoes. I don’t get all that many blisters, but I’d love it if I just got none; I had no sooner nursed one of them away when this one popped up. It’s a very slow game of whack-a-mole on my poor little feet.

A few weeks ago, I found a pair of denim shorts that I used to wear quite a bit while I was living in Alaska. At a size 46, I could just get them on with a little effort. They weren’t uncomfortable once on, so I started wearing them all the time and they became increasingly easy to put on. While making dinner last night, I became fed up and removed those same shorts right there in the middle of the kitchen and tossed them aside. When it was convenient, I retrieved a pair of sweatpants to replace them. They have been getting increasingly loose for a while now, and it has become a chore to keep them up, even when I hold them up. Now, yes, I could get myself a belt, but the point still remains that I went from barely being able to squeeze into shorts from 15 years ago to not having enough girth to hold them up. And that is progress if you ask me!

The casing that once held so much fat is weird. It can be squeezed into pants that might otherwise just fit if I hadn’t stretched out the skin. I had another experience similar to the denim shorts late last night. In my quest for another pair of shorts, I tried on some from my twenties. I was a size 38 for many years, so most of my clothes from that time–and yes, I still have a lot of them–are that size. I was actually able to a pair on and fastened. They weren’t still comfortable once on, squeezing me just a bit too much, but they fastened and that made me literally jump up and down in a sort of cartoonish moment of glee. It means a few things.

Apparently, I can do this. I need a lot of reminders!

As I continue from here, I have plenty of clothes to look forward to. That said, I wouldn’t call the clothes of my teens & twenties aspirational. Those were the days when I primarily shopped at County Seat and my edgy clothes came from The Buckle. I was default settings White. I sorta still am.

I am a “Skinny Legend.”

I can, and will, take over the world.

Today is probably going to be a stressful day. I’m trying to fight that back as best I can, but it’s going to be very hot this afternoon and I have to get some things packed and ready to move to storage tomorrow. That doesn’t even address the lack of space I have in the storage unit, but that isn’t something I have the mental energy to quibble over just now. Generally, I’m feeling great this morning. I just know what is coming today and I’m not sure just having the right attitude will help me out.

[Walk #83]

Mindful Musings: In My Green Shirt

There’s a photo I like to share of myself when I was around my heaviest. It was one I had Justin take of me standing on the front porch in one of the many short-lived “diet” plans I attempted in the time when I wasn’t taking things as seriously. I stood in the same spot during my meditation, glasses in my pocket, trying to focus on the birds–often, it is the birds that get me out of my own way–but I struggled to not think about how much I feel changed. And then I realized I am wearing the very clothes I was wearing in that photo. They hang loosely on me now, but it made me really want a photo recreation today. I’ll see if Justin will take another. Maybe I should wait for a year for this kind of thing, but I am impatient. When I looked it up, I found that the shirt isn’t the same. They are the same size though, and the pants are almost certainly the same.

The Wandering Hermit: Geri & The Economy

Brian 7 June 2024 Leave a Comment

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.

The Wandering Hermit: A Maximalist & A Poet

Brian 6 June 2024 Leave a Comment

I had two things on my mind while I was walking:

1. How can I find simplicity?

I’m a maximalist. While I wish that were only true in my design preferences, it’s actually something take follows me through my life and often robs me of the peace of mind I might otherwise have in a given situation. And I’m not entirely sure how to make it stop. I’ve been loading things up for storage, but what is overwhelming is that I have a lot… of stuff that I love. I don’t really have excessive utilitarian items; in fact, I think my tool collection is rather lacking and I want to try reducing it. What I have is things I love to look at, to surround myself with.

Yes, yes, I’m building a house in the relatively near future, and I will be able to fill it with many of those things. How do I, in the meantime, let go of some of the things that don’t really need to go with me. The things that I’ve attached a meaning to, but which do not have any great significance themselves.

I considered not putting this on here. They were my walking thoughts, sure. But I did think about not including them because in my mind they aren’t directly related to my health journey. Aren’t they though? Why would I set out to work so hard on getting my body healthy, but just ignore something that needs to be addressed simply because it is happening in my head.

2. Why am I a poet?

Or really, why is anyone? Of course I don’t mean that in a what even is the point of this sort of way. I actually find great value in poetry, not just for myself, but for humans more broadly. What I mean by the question is what causes some people to communicate in this way? I think about this a lot actually. The three people I spend the most time around are my two brothers and my closest friend (and housemate). All three of them have expressed how they “don’t understand” poetry or “I wish people would just say what they mean” (meaning I suppose that authors should just be direct and get to the point). And I don’t mind them not getting it; I have poetry friends who I can talk about this stuff with. What it does make me think is that our brains have taken very different paths to this point. That second point in particular–“I wish people would just say what they mean”–is interesting. I hear that one probably the most, or some variation on that theme. But when I employ metaphor to compare my fingers to worms or write about walking and talking with a long dead person, I am saying what I mean. I am getting to the point quickly. In fact, I’m getting there more quickly than if I had to say what I have to say without the metaphor. If I break my sentence up on the page, I am doing that intentionally as well. It’s what feels right in that moment. It’s how I processed information and how my brain needed to communicate that information. I’m not exactly E.E. Cummings, but I do understand why he was so interested in making his readers work to enjoy his words. I have no evidence of this, but I think it is just as likely that Cummings was doing exactly what I do from day to day, but also wanted his readers to see the world in the same way. So he attempted to force it. That isn’t to say that one way of viewing the world is necessarily better than another. Of course not. But it is endlessly fascinating that there are people in this world who aren’t moved to spend hours writing when the sun crests over the horizon is a certain way.

[Walk #81]

The Wandering Hermit: Rested, Drenched, & Nearly Zen

Brian 5 June 2024 Leave a Comment

Last night, I knew I would want to sleep in today, and I did just that. I periodically woke up this morning and just decided to go back to sleep. It wasn’t a lack of motivation; I knew I would eventually get my walk in, but I wanted to make sure I was caught up on sleep. While I’ve been waking up naturally around 5:00am, I have found that I’m a little sleepier in the afternoons than I used to be, and much more so than I would like to be. I think I’m just not quite getting enough sleep. According to my watch, I am averaging 5 hours & 56 minutes of sleep over the past month. That’s down a full hour from Spring and over two hours from January. It’s pretty similar to the amount I was sleeping at the end of last summer. That might be fine, but I am a lot more active than I was last year. A whole lot more. I just don’t know that six hours cuts it at the moment. But my brain doesn’t seem to know that and so I just hop up each morning. I could attempt to solve the issue on the other end, going to bed an hour earlier. I already get such a hard time for being in bed by 10:00pm. If I’m already getting it, I might as well go for another hour.

I worked up quite a sweat during my morning walk today. I have been trying to get my heart rate up, and some mornings I have only very limited success doing that. Today was going better, and I was just drenched in sweat as a result. My heart rate during walks is all over the place, but the number does look like it is trending upward. The whole thing did make me think about workout clothes I would like to get. I have been saying from the start of my weight loss plan that once I have gotten to 250, I need new clothes. I’m 19 pounds from that goal, but my clothes being baggy is starting to feel like an issue. Some mornings, my shirt feels absolutely in the way, billowing out, folding in and rubbing against me, becoming heavy with sweat. I’ve been wearing my rattiest clothes for walking; they aren’t going with me into my future, so they might as well be of use right now. The problem is that some of them are becoming a hinderance. Even the pair of denim shorts I was so excited to be able to wear again after not being able to do so for 15 years have become so big that they just drop off if I stand still for too long. I had been walking in them, but they cannot be trusted. And my waist is in a weird transition period where I still can’t seem to find a decent belt that fits me, but my pants are all starting to require it. I’m close on the fit, mind you, but it’s just not quite there. Of course, I could just go ahead and get my gym clothes now, but I don’t intend to stop losing weight and I don’t want to waste money. I’ll play around with a list on Amazon; just browsing my settle me down a little bit and let me pause and wait for that goal.

I did not take my phone on my walk this morning; I wanted to just enjoy the sounds around me, but the birds weren’t still singing as I walked later than usual and so the sounds of the morning were just the occasional car driving by. It wasn’t the zen experience I would have hoped for, so tomorrow I will take my music!

[Walk #80]

The Wandering Hermit: A Friendly Man

Brian 4 June 2024 Leave a Comment

A nice man stopped to ask how many miles I walk each morning. I see his truck pass often, but I thought it was nice to have someone stop to say hi. I hope he has a nice day. I thought about telling him how I’d lost so much weight and how my health journey was partly sparked by turning 44 and realizing that Grandpa Fuchs died at 45, and Dad started having heart attacks regularly in his 40s. I don’t know if I will have staved off those things, but it did start to narrow my perspective and remind me that I probably won’t live forever, despite my insistence to do so. So, no, I just chose mild self-deprecation instead, downplaying my 2 miles as trivial before he moved on.

Justin joined me on my walk again this morning, but he only got in one mile. He didn’t sleep again last night, a problem he’s been having. It’s hard to be productive with such a small amount of sleep.

The world is muddy today. I wasn’t entirely sure how much it had rained last night, but more than I anticipated. It made my paths awkward and short, so I had to just do the small bit in front of the house. And really that was fine. It had been a few days since I did that one.

[Walk #79]

The Wandering Hermit: Flitting About In The Trees

Brian 3 June 2024 Leave a Comment

A storm was passing by to the South as I started on my walk, which made for a dramatic start. Near the end of my walk, there were scissortails flitting about between a group of red cedars and the fence across the street. At one point, a hawk flew overhead with a scissortail chasing after him. They kept popping in and out of view for a few moments, but of course as soon as I’d get my phone out I wouldn’t see them anymore. And they’d show up as soon as I gave up. I assume the hawk was chased off successfully; ahead a bit, the males continued flitting about, trying to catch the eyes of the females.

Today’s walk was good, but I was having a difficult time with the gravel. You would think they had enlarged it overnight; I was slipping on it terribly. I’m looking forward to walking somewhere paved. It’s unfortunate because I love my walks out here for the things I see, but they are quite hard on my feet.

Yesterday I kept having the feeling that I just couldn’t believe the day was still going. I’m usually incapable of processing more than one task in a day. It all feels overwhelming and the days slip by so quickly—a bit of ADHD. It was such a strange feeling and I wonder if it has to do with regular exercise. Look, I know I’m not running marathons each morning. I’m not doing bodybuilding…. I’m just walking, and really at the end of the day 2 miles isn’t even all that much walking. But it’s huge for me. I started walking at the beginning of April. My goal was to walk everyday, to set a reasonable goal that I could achieve, and do as much as I could do before I thought I needed to stop (pain or whatever). During that first week, I was averaging .75 miles per walk. And that was all I could do. That was a huge change from August 2023 when I walked to the end of the house and back and it was wiped out for the rest of the day. Or October 2023, when I was using my exercise bike. I looked at my log and I had one days of 14 minutes and one of 16 minutes, and I remember those being monumentally huge accomplishments. So, my three quarter mile walks in April felt like a pretty big deal. At this point, I’m doing 2 miles each morning. I’m focused more on pace than on increasing that distance, but I’ll also increase the distance soon probably.

What I’m feeling most ready for, rather than upsetting my walking routine, is doing some other types of exercise later in the day. Of course, I have no clue where to start. That is still what the internet is for—until it starts generating nonsensical workout routines for me via AI. But the info in out there. I’m ready to go find it. And I’m ready to fill my days with things to do. If there are really this many hours in a day, I’m both excited about my future and a little disappointed in my past. Such is life.

[Walk #78]

The Wandering Hermit: Embracing My Chaos

Brian 2 June 2024 Leave a Comment

I felt so lazy yesterday, and that feeling sort of spilled out into this morning. I didn’t get started until 6:30am, but that wasn’t because I had slept in. I just sort of didn’t get up, convincing myself that later would be fine too. That may be true, but it’s not the attitude I want to have. I went down to Prairie Rd and back, sort of grumbling about it for the first quarter mile. But I eventually got over it and finished my walk feeling a lot better.

I’m probably doing too much again. I worry about the way I get into projects. I have grown to love the chaotic nature of everything, but it can all feel overwhelming. What I really want is systems in place to make everything I want to do feel easier, even if those systems are creating a façade. They usually are. I have been journaling for my entire life. It is just part of who I am, but I’m often lax about it and I have always wished I kept up with it more consistently. I have spent 2024 setting new goals for myself at the start of each month, and sometimes they stick and sometimes they don’t. For June, I wanted to figure out my journaling systems. I’m 45 years into chaos, so coming up with something now might prove to be a challenge. But of course, I went in so hard that it feels like an unbelievably huge undertaking. I do that. Sometimes I end up conquering the huge task, and sometimes I give up. This one feels particularly important to me, so I want to succeed.

[Walk #77]

The Wandering Hermit: The Illusionary Plateau

Brian 1 June 2024 Leave a Comment

Ominously foggy morning. Just joined me for my morning walk, and it was a nice change to have some company. He of course showed up early because he hadn’t slept yet, so it was still pretty dark and on a morning when it is so foggy, that made it hard to see much of anything until about 5:45am.

My weight is starting to bother me. I was okay with plateaus, but when I look back at 1 May 2024, only a month ago, I was at 280.8 lb/127.37 kg. Today I am at 273.6 lb/124.10 kg. That just is such a tiny change for an entire month. I did manage to get down to 268.8 lb/121.93 kg during May, but I bounced right back up. I’m just not sure what the problem is exactly. Maybe I’m eating too many calories, but it doesn’t seem like it. I keep track and I don’t really go over. I am also moving a lot more. This plateau has been during the time I went from 1 mile daily to 2. I’m exercising more than I had been. I honestly don’t know what is causing me an issue. I think for June I am going to have to strip everything back and rebuild my diet. That will allow me to see where I might be going wrong. It’s getting frustrating because I should still be losing weight. That said, 7 lb in one month is actually very good, so I should be happy with it. It is just such a dramatic drop in progress that I can’t help feeling a little discouraged.

My pace was good today. Averaged 21’28”/mile. Justin is already in better shape than I am, so he tends to walk faster naturally. It was good to have him walking with me because it made me walk faster just to keep up. According to my Fitness app, all of my heart health numbers are improving steadily… slowly, but steadily. The graph shows all of them trending in the right direction starting in April when I started adding a daily walk to my routine. It turns out, exercise might actually work. Who knew?

[Walk #76]

The Wandering Hermit: Do The Things Anyway

Brian 31 May 2024 Leave a Comment

I was not feeling terribly motivated this morning, but I pushed through and did it anyway. I thought I might just walk the bit of road from here to the end of the property along Burris, a route I take a lot (It takes six laps to get two miles in), but I decided today would be a good day to take the most challenging of the routes to the next road and back, so I went down to Prairie Road. I did that one specifically because I lacked the enthusiasm, almost like I was punishing myself for that feeling. Really, I think I was just trying to balance everything out. When I’m really with it and into my morning walk, I tend to walk faster and longer. If I’m not going to do that, I might as well take the hills and get my heart rate up that way. It was a nice morning—a little damp from yesterday’s rain, but nothing muddy or slippery.

I’m starting to feel very excited about having systems in place to help keep me organized enough to be more consistent with… everything. That was some advice I got from Robert the other day, and he couldn’t be more correct. But when I think about how I’ve been for the past 20 years, consistency is not what comes to mind. That all gives me a sort of false impression of myself actually. The thing I’m inconsistent about is the time and manner of my work, but not as much the work itself. I think of myself as someone who wished they kept up with journaling, but also someone who cannot seem to get it together when it comes to journaling. When I really look at it, I journal a lot and often. It’s just in a physical journal and on my blog and in my meal planning notebook and on a scrap of paper here or there and in random text documents on my computer (all saved in different ways) and in letters…. I’m doing it. I’m just not doing it the way I admire in people like Robert who can trace his daily journaling back 40 years, all consistently kept in the same place. It’s okay that mine is chaotic and scattered. It wouldn’t be mine if it wasn’t It seems like a daunting task to gather it all and make sense of it, but I’m working on that. I don’t know who it is for, but I’m working on getting it all compiled.

This morning reminded me a lot of being a teenager. Mom worked at 7:00am, so she’d drop me off at school on the way. That meant I arrived over an hour before classes started and my friend group developed from that. Every morning, Mom would wake me up at 6:00am and every morning I hated it, didn’t want to get up, pushed against it. But by the time I got to school, I was glad to be there. I was excited to spend an hour with my friends. Sometimes we don’t want to do things. That is okay. Do the things anyway.

[Walk #75]

Tag: thoughts