july and august 2019: what I’m learning and loving lately
Hi interweb friends! I (obviously) skipped July, so I’m lumping July and August into one post. I am writing this from my porch in the best possible weather (to me anyhoo), listening to the chickens, migrating birds overhead, and the squirrels that keep either fighting or flirting, I’m not sure which. In other words, I am in my happy place and am feeling very grateful.
Now for the lists…
What I’m loving
Half domes. I bought these for us for Christmas. We keep one in our bedroom, one in the family room, and I keep one under my desk at work. They are magical, and after nearly a year of using them, Grant and I are addicted. The kids think they’re fun to balance on, but I’ll bet they’ll use them more as they get older too. I bought them because Katy Bowman told me to. We use them at least twice a day – when we get up in the morning and before bed at night, more if we think of it. We mostly do variations of the calf stretch, but this post has some other fun ideas too.
Covered water by my bed. So I wrote awhile ago (but I literally just spent twenty minutes searching my own blog and can’t find the previous reference) about how I like to drink a big glass of water right when I wake up (reasons why to do this: you’re dehydrated all night so a big infusion of water will wake your body up and replenish your cells first thing). But, and this might be a weird idiosyncrasy that is just me, I always got a bit weirded out by whatever particles settled in my water overnight. I mean, I couldn’t usually see anything, but it just always weirded me out. So then I stopped the habit for a bit or waited until I got to the kitchen to fill up and down my glass of water. But that glass of water right when I woke up really helped me actually wake up, so I missed it. Then one night, I switched to one of those tumblers with lids instead of our normal bar jars, and the water seemed to taste so much better in the morning. So I just started filling one of those up before bed and setting it on my nightstand with the lid closed. Maybe it was entirely in my head, but who cares because I’m back to my routine that works for me!
YOLO FTW. When we were in Black Mountain over a year ago, Grant saw an old playbill from an Old Crow Medicine Show at Pisgah Brewing, our favorite spot to listen to live music in Black Mountain the land. He said, “if Old Crow ever comes back to Pisgah, we have to go.” To which I replied, “duh.” Fast forward to a little over a month ago, and Grant texts me, “CHECK YOUR EMAIL. OLD CROW IS COMING TO PISGAH.”
I looked at the calendar. We would miss the kids’ first soccer games, we’d have to pull them out of school, we had spent enough money on travel already this summer…
We have two friends our age living with stage four cancer, so “you only live once” has taken on new meaning for Grant and me especially. So we booked an Airbnb, added a few days to our trip to enjoy our other favorite place, and we had so much fun together. As an amazing side benefit, we were explaining our spontaneity to some friends who decided to play hooky and come with us too. I can be talked into lots of stuff when someone drops the “YOLO” line, but it was definitely the right decision this time. Old Crow is the most entertaining band we’ve ever seen, and we’ve seen lots of live music. Our kids love them too (ask Jasper about “three banjos”), and we’ll all always remember seeing them at our favorite spot and the other memories we created along the way.
Down the hatch supplement method. This is a weird one, but it has me on a very long stretch of actually taking all of my vitamins/supplements every night so I feel like I have to share. Grant told me about someone on Instagram or something who put a BIG handful of vitamins in his mouth all at once and just chased them with a glass of water. We take quite a few supplements, and I always used to do it a few-at-a-time, which took all of two minutes but felt like eleven. We take our vitamins at night, and once I’ve decided it’s time for bed, I get really crabby about extra stuff that keeps me from actually getting to bed. So I often found myself skipping the vitamin routine because, in my mind, it took forever, plus I always felt really full afterwards, which is not great right before bed. BUT we both tried this new “down the hatch” method, and we are on perhaps our longest stretch of actually taking our supplements every day in a row. Want to know our go-to list of supplements? Comment below, and I’ll write up a separate list if people are interested!
What I’m learning
Experiential vs narrative self. If you’ve been reading these “what I’m learning and loving” posts for any length of time, you’ve noticed that much of what I’ve been learning over the last few years has to do with building my “present-moment-awareness muscles” and seeing the value and benefit in that. I stand by all of my “aha” moments around the power of presence. And…as an Enneagram 7, who on most Enneagram lists are labeled as the “enthusiast” or “epicure,” I’ve often wondered what would happen if I truly only lived in the present moment. I would probably wind up hosting a nonstop party where everyone takes book breaks with a bottle of champagne in one hand and ice cream in the other 90 percent of the time! I’m only halfway kidding. Basically, I wondered if I truly lived in the moment, wouldn’t I just do what I wanted to do (described above) all the time with no thought to future consequences?
Then I heard Tal Ben-Shahar on this podcast episode, and he explained how we have (at least) two selves: the experiential self and the narrative self. Basically, the experiential self is the one who experiences life moment-by-moment, and, because we’re story-making beings, the narrative self is the part of us always creating stories about our experiences. If we could only live in experiential-self-mode, we would eliminate most of our suffering because our suffering arises mostly from the stories we tell ourselves about our pain and trauma once its over. But we would also miss out on the meaning and adventure and learning that comes with being story-tellers. We are both, and I think, we want it that way.
It is helpful to build and strengthen your ability to be present because you can recognize false or inaccurate stories for what they are, and it is valuable and life-giving to have stories to tell ourselves and others.
My biggest take-away from this was just an antidote that Ben-Shahar and Dax shared on the podcast about how we talk to ourselves about our days when we’re laying in bed at night. When I’m laying in bed at night and recounting how the day went, there are certain activities or patterns that make me feel good about the story I’m writing with my life, and there are certain activities or patterns that make for a story I’m not as proud of. Obviously, there has to be tons of self-compassion here, and no one (me especially) is looking for the perfect day, but this framework helps me to think through whether or not things I want to do in the moment serve the larger story I want to tell with my life. This way of thinking helps me find the pause, as Viktor Frankl points us to.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
My quality of sleep makes or breaks everything else. Is this just getting older? Perhaps I’m turning into an old lady, but whatevs. Sleep has always been very important to my mental and emotional health, but over several weeks of traveling in July and August, I learned that quality of sleep is reeeeally important to my health. In July, Grant and I were fortunate enough to go solo to a place we’ve always wanted to go together: the Oregon coast. It was spectacularly beautiful. We had amazing food and drinks, we met beautiful people, I practically pinched myself at the scenery at each new stop. It was a wonderful vacation, and I definitely want to go back. And I didn’t sleep all that great (with the exception of one night in an amazing bed in this Airbnb). It wasn’t anything against the places we stayed. I just think sleep gets a little trickier and more important the older we get.
I don’t usually experience anxiety like many people describe it – panicky, short-of-breath, constricted feeling in the body (I experience anxiety, but it manifests in different ways for me typically). But toward the end of the week in Oregon despite having SOO much fun ALONE with my husband around amazing natural beauty, I had more than a few moments of that traditional anxiety feeling. I got home, had a reeeally long sleep in our own bed, and felt my baseline almost immediately return to normal the next day. Of course, there is more to this than just good sleep, but we had several weeks in a row of travel, and I noticed that feeling popped back up after just a few nights of not-great sleep. So on our trip to Black Mountain, we all packed our own pillows because we’ve noticed that good pillows can make up for a pretty crappy mattress.
I’m filing this under more evidence that we’re all walking n-of-one trials, and we have to figure out what works best for us in each season.
I’m already learning lots in the #septembernaturechallenge, so I’ll be excited to report back at the end of the month. Get it on the fun if you haven’t already!
Your turn – what are you learning and loving lately?
