Movement (beginning)
Working Out, Habits, and Routines
I guess I can write here just as well as I can write anywhere else, right?
…and it’s not public until I publish it. So I’m safe here. For now. If I ever do hit “continue” and post this (which, if you’re someone who is not me and you are reading this, I must have done), that’s something different.
I’m not used to being taken seriously and it’s had an effect over the years.
A lot of resentment has accrued.
I THINK I could have fun with this, though? I know I do actually love to write. And I’ve twisted most of the things I enjoy doing the most over the years into sources of anxiety leading to endless repeating loops of procrastination, inaction, and a deep sense of frustration. It simmers and becomes something akin to self-loathing after enough time has passed.
So I still really and truly have No Idea what I am doing here or anywhere else, really? I want to push myself to be a bit more courageous, to take those leaps of faith I’m always talking about. Perhaps the first step for me is simply admitting that I don’t know what I’m doing and going ahead and doing the thing anyway.
After all, I’ve actually had dreams of publishing a personal newsletter for years now. Years. And it’s such a simple little thing, isn’t it?
I’m lying in my bed on a lazy Sunday listening to the rain. My legs are sore from working out yesterday. The gym in my building has been right down the hall, maybe 30 feet from the door to my apartment, for three years. I have a complicated history with exercising, all knotted up with my histories of eating disorders and perfectionism and mental illness. But I felt really good when I finally got a friend to come over and walk into that space with me, so I didn’t feel as terrified.
I hadn’t gotten onto an elliptical machine and typed in my age and weight since I was in college. The numbers I was punching in now would have quite literally made me want to kill myself if I’d had to claim them as my own back then. Yet I feel infinitely more confident in my body now than I did then. It’s interesting how numbers can mean so much or so little depending on the context.
Anyway.
I broke a sweat and I punched a punching bag and I did some squats and lunges and it was all quite exhausting and exhilarating. I really do hope I can make this into more of a habit moving forward. Or a routine. I think about habits and routines a lot.
“Habit” comes from Latin habitus "condition, demeanor, appearance, dress," from the verb habere "to have, hold, possess, wear; find oneself, be situated; consider, think, reason, have in mind; manage, keep." Nuns wear habits every day. We inhabit our own little habitats as we habitually go about our lives. It’s the thing you’ve been wearing for so long you’ve started to identify with it. A second skin, almost.
“Routine,” on the other hand, is essentially the same word as “route.” “Road” comes from the same source, as does “rupture.” That source is Latin rupta (via) "(a road) opened by force," referring to the absolute rupturing of nature that had to take place in order for all those roads that famously lead back to Rome to be built. Via is the way, and we do kind of know that, once it’s pointed out. But the “roads” we more commonly refer to are actually fractures in the natural world. Corruptions, one might even say.
So habits are given to us and they tend to cover us completely. We just have to keep putting them on until it becomes automatic. Establishing routines involves forcefully breaking through whatever the natural terrain is to carve out a different path. Habits feel slightly less intentional than routines, to me. I think a habit is something you can drift into without thinking about it, while a routine has to be firmly established in defiance to some kind of natural tendency.
So that’s where I am right now, musing about etymologies at least once a day and putting on something that doesn’t feel like a habit quite yet, but perhaps in time it can become one. Trying to find a balance between flowing toward natural tendencies and rupturing the pattern in places where I know I want to change the topography a bit.
I’ll figure it out as I go along. One thing I know for sure is that I am getting sick and tired of sitting on top of all my creativity trying to stifle myself because I’m too afraid to take a risk and put myself out there, GOD FORBID.
So hopefully this is the beginning of something new and beautiful that will open up all sorts of doors and windows so new things can come pouring in and out.
Thanks so much for being a part of my silly little journey.
