Keep it moving

Yesterday was a good day. Let's discuss why.

I had the day off, thanks to the ongoing "furlough days" my company has adopted to help address cash flow problems (theirs, not mine). I started the day the same way I start a lot of work-free days: with a feeling of lightness and energy and all the things I want to accomplish buzzing around the inside of my head like houseflies. Often, the first challenge is to corral and list all these ideas before this fleeting clarity of purpose dissipates like (the opposite of) a morning fog.

I compiled an ambitious list of chores, and got started. Early on, it occurred to me that this was a component of my daily head space that I'd forgotten: just "keep it moving." I have lapsed over the past year or two into a very sedentary lifestyle. While adopting a couch potato-like recreational life sounds very relaxing, it's not a satisfying default. From the couch, I can see and imagine all the productive things that need doing. However, my brain has developed some very effective techniques for thwarting such noble impulses.

One such techniques is drinking the beer. Oh, how I enjoy most every sip of beer. But not all of them. If you pay attention to your body chemistry, you can discern a lot about how your body reacts to booze. You get the rush, the gentle euphoria, the energy boost... and then what the good Lord giveth, He also taketh away. What goes up must come down, and as the tide comes in, so it must go out, etcetera. The high is equal to the crash, and there's only so much you can do to ameliorate that equation. If you avoid it altogether, I find that even this fat, oldish body can maintain natural energy for over a surprisingly longer time period. I'd forgotten that.

And so it came to be that after working through the morning, when I prepared myself a cheap but pleasant lamb lunch, I forwent skipped the accompanying wine. Dodged that metabolic bullet!

At the end of the day, I got just over half my list done. Not as much as I hoped, but the results of a genuine effort are hard to feel bad about.

And throughout the day, it dawned upon me increasingly, that just "keeping it moving" is a pretty good ethos to weave into the quilt of my daily operating procedures. It's especially helpful because I can be quick to despair at too many choices, especially when planning my day. For some reason, this mindset helps me keep it positive and light, and not get stuck.

At the end of the day, I wasted spent a considerable period of time playing video games, without a pang of guilt or regret, and I got some good stuff done. A good day.