routine recharging

It's 7:15 on a Friday morning and I am blogging. Already today I have:

• hula hooped for 20 minutes (which, according to the box, could have burned something like 600+ calories...?! Not that I count. I measure workouts by sweat and burn, and satisfaction)
• made coffee
• scooped out the cat's litter box
• fed said cat
• grabbed the mail which I forgot last night, and the remnants of balloons from Maria's grad party on Sunday
• closed all the windows according to my mom's "temperature + humidity" formula for keeping the house cool without wasting resources
• washed a few dishes
• put the fresh batch of granola I made last night into the giant plastic container we keep it in
• I also am eating some. I think it is the best batch yet.

The reason I have been up long enough to do all of these things goes back to my to-do list. I didn't know when I wrote it how big of an impact it would have on my life. I didn't expect to do so many of those things, or to do many other things by extension of it.

I'm up because, as I mentioned in my progress report, I started a pretty disciplined tradition of waking up early to go swimming every Monday morning. It has really been an energizing way to start the weeks. It feels so good, in fact, that I decided to start getting up early EVERY morning to work out. This week I've done swimming, running (still sore from this, it's been such a long time since I ran), yoga, hula-hooping. My main hangup on doing this is just that I haven't committed to anything by the time I wake up in the morning, so my alarm goes off and I think, "OK! I'm awake. What could I do this morning?" And then I lie there for 5-12 minutes debating with myself over different workouts I could do, or going back to sleep for another 45 minutes. So that is something that will change next week. I just have to plan.

I used to be a night person, or I used to call myself that, back in middle school/high school. I just could never fall asleep, so I would lie there ruminating in the dark for hours, and then wake up early for school and be cranky and tired. Except during swim season. When my days were full and I wore myself out. That, and the herbal tea of the destination, has become my cure for jet lag: touch down, sit down, have a cup of tea, go out and do stuff until a reasonable bedtime hour, and then pass out. Wake up the next day at a reasonable hour, and repeat.

This new routine has already changed my life in a few key ways. Exercising energizes me, so I start the day with a boost coffee can never give me. I'm much more focused and less restless all day. Even though I've been getting less sleep, I'm more productive and I have more stamina to keep it going until bedtime. It makes it harder to skip a workout. I have a whole evening to check other things off my to-do list. Until last week, I would get up and drag myself to work, come home, scramble to change into workout clothes, go to the gym, come back home and eat dinner, take a shower, and go to bed. And if I really needed to do something else in a week, or in a day, (which never happens, LOL) I had to skip working out. My stress level, thanks to this schedule, was sky-high.

My schedule still desperately needs pruning, but so far this week I have looked at a potential rental house, filled up my car with gas and my tires with air, gone out to dinner with my parents, written a long-awaited blog post, made granola, submitted a rental application, gone to Target (that shopping list has been in the making for a WHILE), packed for my trip to the beach this weekend, AND (drumroll) I finally wrote and mailed those letters that spurred me to write my to-do list in the first place! ...A month and a half ago. But I did it!

This is starting to sound a bit infomercial-y. I promise I'm not trying to guilt you all into making leaps and bounds in your lives. This blog is called second set of baby steps for a reason. We're walking blind here, and we have big shoes to fill, big dreams to fulfill. That's why any stride I make gets me excited.

One of the best parts about letters (though I could write at least one full post about what is great about them) is that the more you write them, the more you get them. I'm sure the correlation would be just about 1, if you plotted it out. And letters (or comments, emails, texts...) from you people are what make it possible to take baby steps, and what make it easier to take toddler steps and kid steps and angsty teen steps. And I'm sure they have the same effect going the other way, too. We've covered a lot of important ground in letters this year, and throughout my life. We've also covered a lot of ground in phone calls, which I have never ever ever made and picked up so frequently at any other point in my life. (I have a friend here in Wilmington who calls me to check in and chat about once a week, even though she lives literally 7 minutes away from me, even if I'm probably going to see her. It's weird how weird it is, but she'll leave me voicemails telling me just to call her back when I get a chance. No reason. No emergency. Just to talk. It's kind of cool. It's something I haven't done since I had curfews and since my parents could still tell me I wasn't allowed to go out.)

The great thing about letters, though, is you can go back and read them a billion times if you want, until they disintegrate. Whenever you have letters that you can touch, if there is something hand-addressed to you in the mailbox by a familiar pen (often the G2, in my case), you can never honestly bemoan your aloneness in the world. It just doesn't resolve.

Let me bring this back full circle. I usually have an idea for what I'm going to write about, and usually the post I imagined is not at all what I end up writing. Today I wanted to write about two things; one of them was my new routine -- again, partially to hold myself publicly accountable to keeping it up, and partially because I'm excited about it and it feels really good and I like to share good things that I am excited about. (Anyone who is my Facebook friend will know this all too well...)

Halfway through this post, I started to panic because a.) it always takes me way longer to write a post than I think it will when I start out, and I'm in danger of being late for work right now, and b.) I had NO idea how I was going to tie in the second thing I wanted to write about:

This is a picture of postcards I've been sent, most of them through the course of this year.
I pin them to the bare drywall in my basement and look at them every day and think,
"Man, am I lucky to have such cool friends who go to such cool places and send such cool postcards."
Man, am I lucky.