Absorbing a Setback -- Naps -- Deep Work & Deliberate Practice

Morning. Up before the sun today: for the first time since the solstice, I had to turn on lights to perform my morning ceremonies. A little sad for the waning of the light. I have, now, a late-found affection for summer and warm weather. Some combination of getting older and getting thinner: I tolerate heat much better than I did when I was younger and stouter.

Speaking of thinner and stouter, I dropped back below 160 lbs yesterday. During the stresses and disruptions of this Spring I went off the rails with my eating for a week or two, and skipped or reduced a bunch of my workouts, and found myself at 165 lbs, with a 34 1/2 inch waist. It's taken four weeks to bring things back to where I want them to be. One complexity is that I don't have a goal weight or waistline, any more. My goal is a relationship -- the hips measuring three inches more than the waist -- and what that may work out to, in absolute pounds and inches, I can't know until I get there. Plus, I don't know whether the three inch thing is really appropriate for my age. Some people think that more padding is to be desired, at my advanced age, but what they base that on is (so far as I know) a single study that shows that you die slower if you're fatter. I don't know that I want to die slower: I just want to die later. The active and healthy-looking old people I see are skinny as a rail. I suspect that's the way to go. Not having absolute numbers to aim for, though, is a bit of a psychological disadvantage. My graphs show me moving in the right direction: but the waist and hip measurements are mushier than the scale's. It will be nice when I have a simple stable number of pounds that I want to weigh. 

Anyway -- to the purpose of my rather thought, as Mr Chaucer would say -- this is important to me because I had two criteria, from way back when I started this weight loss enterprise. One was, I had to keep the weight off for five years. The other was, that I had to be able to absorb a setback -- to go off the rails and get back on. For the first, well, I won't know for another three years whether I can declare success or not. But I seem to have demonstrated the second, now. I can recover from driving into the ditch, using exactly the same methods I used for the long march. They haven't magically become ineffective. (If that sounds absurd, well, it is: but it is also my experience of all the diets heretofore that have failed. Once they "broke" their effectiveness was wrecked.)

So -- that's all good. 

The other thing: I'm learning, in earnest, to take naps. In experimenting, a la Cal Norman, with trying to make space for blocks of "deep work" in my schedule, I discovered something important: the problem was not so much that social media was sucking up my time as that I was too fatigued. That is, I was lingering on Facebook and so forth because I was too tired to do real work, and I was too tired because my nightly sleep is regularly broken -- BPE -- and I was never making up the deficit. So I'm learning to sleep in the day. So grateful for having the flexibility of schedule to make that possible. A huge luxury.

There are two things I want to focus "deep work" time on: "deliberate practice" of Spanish, and "deliberate practice" of massage. I have periodically little fits of anxiety and dismay about whether my massage is good enough, which have never been wired to actually doing anything to improve it. But it does get better when I study and practice it. There's nothing magical about it. It follows the same path as any other skill. 

The anxiety is kind of stupid anyway, since it's already good enough, in practical terms: there's no way that the average kid just a year or two out of school is going to do work as effective as mine, and about half of the massage therapists out there are kids just a year or two out of school. From the business point of view, it hardly matters how good I am. It only matters from the point of how I feel about myself, and how I respond to anxiety. I'm sick of responding to anxiety about my worthiness with extravagant spiritual projects or literary enterprises that never quite happen. For more decades than I care to think about, my response to doubting my skills has been to work on a new and secret set of skills that I will someday unveil to the astonishment of the world. Screw that. I can just work on the things I actually do, and actually get better at them, right out in the light of day.