Thursday, January 11, 2007

sweating in the cold, cold city

Beautiful blue skies here in Portland today! A dusting of snow and happy home-from-school kids, so intstead of burying myself in client work, I'm engaging in bits and pieces. Blog-writing being one.

I am quite pleased with the inaugural Sweat in the City column, which will appear monthly in the Northwest Women's Journal. It should be online soon, but meanwhile, I took the liberty of testing our new scanner and reproducing the hard-copy herein.


Here's the essay, featuring me in my pj's, reading Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.

Lazy, phlegmatic and happy enough...but, what has plagued me most of my life is the way low energy encourages more of the same. Though sipping wine and sinking into a good book while a fire (particularly a fire produced by igniting a fake log) glows sleepily in the background is comforting and inviting, it tends to encourage flacidity as opposed to vibrant, energized spark.

I'm happiest when I'm producing. In particular, I'm happiest when I'm producing something I didn't set out to produce. In order to reach the point where the muse takes over, or the zone, or whatever you wish to call it, endorphins must be part of the mix. Those byproducts of sweat, elevated heart rate, and neurology that's been bolstered by physical engagement.

Take the other day. My head pounding with the endpoint of free-floating anxiety, I was dying to nap. Instead, I went to Pilates. It was sooooooo hard to not talk myself out of going. A Nike moment for sure, where I made myself not think about it. Five minutes into the Reformer (after the dreaded 100s and before the knee stretches), my headache dissolved. I left the studio an hour later refreshed and invigorated and full of enough energy to actually follow up on client business that I'd been dreading. And I did so with a smile in my voice instead of the bitchy tone I would have had had I not worked out.

So, enough proselytizing. Happy writing, and happy moving.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for commenting. If you have trouble posting a comment, let me know! suzyvitello@gmail.com