Since March 25th, 58 days ago, I’ve recorded 38 workouts on my Quarantine Workouts doc. I didn’t start it for the purpose of tallying up my days, but it's cool to know that I move my body at least 66% of the time. On the days where I feel compelled to move, which is most days, I write up a workout consisting of four or five rounds of seven minutes each. Each round cycles four movements of varying reps, and I run through the movements until the timer taps me out, or until I physically can’t handle anymore. And on days where even the thought of writing up a workout proves too exhausting, I do yoga.
For me, movement is merely meditation prep. And this approach has proved to be the most sustainable one yet. I like phases. I like getting real into something, and then finding something else to be real into a few weeks later. That’s just my nature. Always has, and always will. Some things are worth reforming, the nature of who you are isn’t.
I move well so I can meditate well, and I meditate well so I can create well, and so on. To be sustainable is to be cyclical, it’s a fundamental rule of natural systems. Again, no use fighting the nature of things, it is much bigger than what is in your control.
Words are hard this week, which is frustrating because thoughts come to me easily. Somehow there’s a disconnect. Maybe I just need to warm up. A block is always promising though, it usually means that some crumbling and rebuilding are in the works. It always does. Dead end, evolution, etc.
Quarantine has gone like this: the first week or two I was a big ball of sad, then there was the Masterclass and watercolor phase, which was also when I started doing Facetime workouts (which then kicked off my quarantine workout doc). I almost forgot, but this was also the time of venturing into the Bay with my dad on the boat and chasing striped bass (emphasis on the chasing part). This was also the peak use of I’M SO OVER IT. It primarily being the final details of a magazine I had been working on for a couple months. There gets to be a point in every creative process where no matter how great, or inventive the product you create is, you just can’t stand looking at, thinking about it, and especially, working on it. Remind me to NEVER pursue graphic design. But it turns out that, just like running, graphic design for me is an excellent pursuit in Type Two Fun, namely, the fun that is no fun in the moment, but great fun in retrospect. Ah, the beauty of time to erase misery.
Then was the era of creative visualizations, and also when I hopped back on the torch after a solid ten months without doing glass. This was also very much the era of excessive seeking. Seeking primarily for an escape.
I counted, in early March, how many planes I had ridden since New Years. It was something like 14. Fourteen planes in a matter of eight-ish weeks. This was no anomaly. Since I had graduated in June, I had traveled and fished all summer, met friends I would come to know as soul sisters, and departed for a three month program in Nepal that would strip me down to the very purest core of who I was. From June of 2019 to March 2020, I had spent maybe eight weeks at home in small, scattered parcels of time.
And then I was to spend at least two months at home, straight. Like really at home. Like not leaving the house.
To say the least I had some major work to do. Constantly moving became automatic. Every time I was in need of a restart, I would conveniently have some sort of escape tightly bound in my calendar, and hoards of United flight confirmations in my inbox to prove it.
Last night I watched Aeronauts, a fictionalized story of the first highest flight (or is it float?) of a hot air balloon in the 1860’s. They haphazardly reached something like 35,000 feet with pretty much no reinforcements to help them survive such heights.
Anyways, much of the CG footage was them soaring above the clouds. It was magical. But also super normal. Anytime you hop on a plane you soar at such heights, and you see, just like they saw with such wonder, life above clouds. Except everyone always bitches about plane rides, the stuffy air and crappy food, the child squealing three rows up.
Sitting in my childhood room on Hillview Road, I finally had to sit with myself. There was a lot of catching up to do.
But one day, after cycling through guided meditation and visualization tapes for a few weeks, I finally felt ok. It was momentous, but in that moment of realization there was profound calm. I’ve conquered home.
The times that I had felt truly alive and at home in my body were always these altered experiences of life (High Mountain Institute my junior year, 2018, and my Where There Be Dragons Nepal trip, fall 2019). Somehow through these experiences I had calculated and set in stone that I could only ever feel this way in these circumstances, in the most foreign and wild places, with folks from all over, doing things I could’ve never imagined for myself. And in this, I set myself up to fail upon my reintegration home.
But now I’ve conquered home.
This basically meant that my plane of existence at home had risen to the plane of existences I had experienced in those ultra-pivotal periods.
If I can feel this way here, I can feel this way ANYWHERE.
And suddenly the world was at my fingertips, and I was flooded with life.
This room, what I can sense for myself, see with my own eyes, is the only thing that exists right now.