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Other helpful self-images: another side note to induced exercise.

Commenter "4ddintx" had a good comment on the post about choosing activities to form a self-image as an athlete:

Just had a thought this morning that being a dancer is another identity that someone may have in terms of their fitness. Not usually what I think of under the category of "athlete" but definitely in the same vein. 

What a great point!  The point is to cultivate a self-image that inherently implies regular physical exertion and training.  "Athlete" is the one that I've worked to develop in myself; "dancer" is another.  I suppose some dancers think of themselves as athletes first and performers second!

Really, any descriptor  that appeals to you will do, as long as it implies the need for physical training and fitness to keep up the skill, and as long as the activity you choose makes sense within that context.  Can we come up with more?  Gymnast?  Circus artist?  I can't think of a concise noun for it, but an image of someone who is capable of fairly hard physical labor might also be helpful -- think of how fit you'd have to be if you worked, say, as a landscaper.

Are you a parent, homeschooling or otherwise, or another sort of mentor?  How about cultivating a self-image as a trainer, coach, fitness instructor?  I'm just throwing it out there.    Does your work, paid or not, make you a role model?  (Health care professional?  Educator?)   How about internalizing that and turning it into "I am a person who sets a good example by getting regular exercise?" 

There's room for a lot of creativity here, and you may even think of a completely original self-image.  Reinhard Engels (he of the No-S Diet and other everyday systems) came up with an excellent one for, well, walking wherever you have to go:  he calls it the Urban Ranger.  The image is borrowed from Lord of the Rings:

Remember Strider, in Lord of the Rings? They didn't call him Sneaker or Sprinter or Sworder, though he possessed these skills in abundance. His distinctive quality, the important, even lethal skill, for which he was named, was that of walking rapidly and mindfully over great distances. Not only could he thus outpace his enemies, but he came to outknow them.

A lethal skill? Well, you say, that's fantasy. OK, skeptic, how did the army of Alexander the Great get to India? They walked. How about the Grande Armee of Napoleon, how did they get all the way from Paris to Moscow? Not on the concorde. For thousands of years winning a war was largely a matter of being there before your enemy. Forced marches routinely left a great deal more than every tenth man dead from exhaustion. So get the aqua sweatpants out of your mind, this is man stuff!

See what I mean?  Reinhard totally made that up, but it's a fantastic reimagining of the self, no?  (At least for anyone who doesn't have kids between ages 3 and 11).

What else can you think of?  Who else can you be?

ADDED:  I happened upon the blog of Deb, a Search and Rescue volunteer, who happened to mention:

Well, it's time to trade my pajamas for spandex and a cotton tee and head to Jazzercise. I'm still trying to lose some pounds off of me and up my fitness level in preparation for that "3 miles in 45 minutes with a 45-pound pack" test for the Technical Rescue Team. 

Add "technical rescue team" to the list of helpfully motivating self-images.  If it's your volunteer calling, or job, to save other people's butts, it helps if yours gets off the couch now and then.

Exercise in the service of your vocation: Induced exercise, part 6.

I will write more about what it means to have exercise at the top of the priority list in another post.  For now, let's talk about discernment.

A couple of days ago I posted about a particularly insidious barrier to prioritizing exercise for health:  it can seem like a self-indulgence.  For that reason, many folks who know the value of self-sacrifice forgo it. 

It could be that we can't see that the struggle to prioritize exercise for health can be embraced as a form of sacrifice. It takes humility to ask for help; it takes selflessness, humility, and gratitude to give up or to de-emphasize our family's other commitments. It could also be because we prefer not to appear self-indulgent, prefer to tell ourselves we are being selfless by putting others first, when really we don't want to change.  This last case trapped me for a long time.

But a large class of people---in my experience, mostly they are mothers---have a much more difficult struggle, because they are truly generous people with an acute awareness of their responsibilities to other people.  They have good, not false, reasons that make it difficult to put their own physical health at a high priority.   The needs of a newborn baby come first.  The needs of several small children come first.  A child with a disability.  Or a tough.  Getting the kids to piano and Scouts.  Getting the homeschooling.  A chance to let a hardworking spouse relax.  Or aging parents to care for.  A peaceful and lovely home. Or getting everyone to daily Mass.  Being there for a close friend in trouble.  Family meals prepared with care and enjoyed unrushed.  Perhaps the pressure to bring in extra income.  Or perhaps there is no other parent around, and everything's on you.  Something going on right now (isn't there always?) and now isn't a good time.  Maybe next month.  Maybe next year.  

If that's you, it's tough, because in truth, you might be right.  Any one of those reasons, and innumerable others, might lead you to prudently decide that exercise can't be your highest priority right now.  Maybe your health is actually pretty good overall, you're not at serious risk of any health problems, you get a decent amount of physical activity just trying to take care of all the stuff you need to do.  Maybe for you it really would be self-indulgent to get some exercise.  Maybe so.  It takes real discernment to decide if it's time to give personal exercise its turn at the top of your priority list.

Because if you hope induced exercise will become a habit---and so sustain itself in times when you can't prioritize it as highly---make no mistake, it has to have a good long turn at the top of your priority list.  It's just not realistic to expect otherwise.  

(Exercise is a habit for me now.  I fit it easily into my schedule.  It isn't my top priority anymore because it doesn't have to be---if I have to miss a workout, it doesn't mean I'm sliding out of control or giving up.  But that never came until our family spent a whole year with "Erin gets two workouts a week" at the top, and I mean the top, of our family's priorities.)

The proper point of view, when it comes to "getting what you need" vs. self-sacrifice, is service of the vocation.  I assume most of my readers are married with children.  It is right and good to get what you need to enable you to live out the duties of your vocation, for the whole length of your life.

A working man who has to support his family needs to eat enough good food, and take care of himself well enough, to be able to perform his job.  Right?  And since he has a responsibility to his wife and children, it's a virtue for him to take care of his body with prudence and temperance, that he may live a long life if he can.  Right?

The same is true for Mom.  

Long-term thinking is appropriate here.  If you become disabled through a preventable illness---I am always thinking of Type II diabetes, which runs in my family---it puts that much more pressure on everybody else.  (See the "aging parents" up there in the list of responsibilities?)  And this is not to get into that culture-of-death "I-don't-want-to-be-a-burden" language.  It's just to point out that a family works together to carry the load in a lot of different ways.  One of the ways you can help later is by taking care of yourself responsibly now.  Be there for your children, so you can support them as they find their own vocation and begin to live it.  Be there for your grandchildren.  Prudence.  

* * *

When is it a good time to give personal exercise its turn at the top of the priority list?

When is it a good time to quit the habit of inactivity and start a new habit of giving yourself what your body needs to thrive?

"Sedentary lifestyle" is a major risk factor for excess deaths in the U.S.   In 1986 it ranked third, behind cigarette smoking and obesity (and one would guess that sedentary lifestyle is also a risk factor for obesity!) 

If you had the habit of cigarette smoking, rather than the habit of inactivity, when would it be a good time to quit smoking?  

Even if quitting smoking made you irritable and hard to live with?  Even if going to meetings and reading motivational literature and seeing your doctor took time away from your family?  Even if the process of kicking the habit made you a Bad Mother while it was going on?

 * * *

I can't tell you whether now is the right time for you to put personal exercise at the top of the priority list.  But I would like to give you permission to consider it strongly possible that this is something you ought to do, not just for yourself, but for everyone who relies on you.  That it's something you ought to do so that you can live out your vocation to the best of your abilities.

If you do prioritize exercise at the top of your list, even though you have a tremendous amount of real responsibility to other people, how do you embrace exercise as a sacrifice?

Simple.

Your sacrifice becomes pure self-discipline.

You make it really count.

You take the precious time allotted for your exercise, or for planning for exercise or traveling to exercise, and you don't waste it.  

You stick to the commitment you've made.

You concentrate on building the habit, so it can become self-sustaining.

You offer it up.

You do it in love.

Self awareness.

Here is a thesis that occurred to me over the weekend as I mused about success and failure, about weakness and willpower, about competing selves:

Could it be that... once you KNOW what you should do...   moral behavior, or "good" behavior, or "healthy" behavior (take your pick) is nothing more than the setting-up of the right incentive structures for oneself? 

 Figuring out what situations, or habits, give you strong incentives to succeed and strong disincentives to fail, and staying in the success-producing ones as much as you can; creating and modifying the incentives in the pre-existing arenas where your life's story unfolds; stepping back one level and creating meta-incentives to lure your self into the places where you feel the power and  the desire to do the right thing, and away from the places where you feel weak, where you do the things you hate yourself for doing.

This is a big topic, and I need to think more about it.  But I just want to say that, as psychobabbley as that sounds, there is certainly precedent for it in Catholic moral teaching.  Remember "avoiding the near occasion of sin?"  That's the idea that you should stay away from situations that strongly tempt you to sin, or activities that have been the precursor of sin in your past.  

It's really rather remarkable that so much writing on willpower, on avoiding temptation, is framed in terms of a kind of splitting or separation of the self.... there's the "me" who wants to lose weight  keep my weight down and the "me" who wants to eat entire sleeve of saltine crackers; a college kid has a "self" who wants to get good grades and a "self" who wants to party tonight... a drinker may have a "self" who decides to go to AA and a "self" who hates every sober minute.  Last month's Atlantic had a thought-provoking article that explored this phenomenon (of one "self" deciding to tie the hands of the other, untrustworthy "self"):

We used to think that the hard part of the question “How can I be happy?” had to do with nailing down the definition of happy. But it may have more to do with the definition of I. Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another. This theory might explain certain puzzles of everyday life, such as why addictions and compulsions are so hard to shake off, and why we insist on spending so much of our lives in worlds —like TV shows and novels and virtual-reality experiences—that don’t actually exist. And it provides a useful framework for thinking about the increasingly popular position that people would be better off if governments and businesses helped them inhibit certain gut feelings and emotional reactions....

The multiplicity of selves becomes more intuitive as the time span increases. Social psychologists have found certain differences in how we think of ourselves versus how we think of other people—for instance, we tend to attribute our own bad behavior to unfortunate circumstances, and the bad behavior of others to their nature. But these biases diminish when we think of distant past selves or distant future selves; we see such selves the way we see other people. Although it might be hard to think about the person who will occupy your body tomorrow morning as someone other than you, it is not hard at all to think that way about the person who will occupy your body 20 years from now. This may be one reason why many young people are indifferent about saving for retirement; they feel as if they would be giving up their money to an elderly stranger.

and then of course there's Romans 7:

What I do, I do not understand. 

 For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.   Now if I do what I do not want, I concur that the law is good.  So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.  For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. 

For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.  Now if (I) do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.  So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.  

Miserable one that I am!   Who will deliver me from this mortal body?

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Therefore, I myself, with my mind, serve the law of God but, with my flesh, the law of sin.

Boy, if that doesn't describe a sense of competing versions of the self, nothing does.

So my question is... is that all there is to it?  Is the "answer" to overcoming temptations of all kinds really for the "inner self" -- the one who "takes delight" in moral or correct or healthy or Godly behavior -- to set up the kind of structure around the "members" that cajoles them to behave?  To offer to the weak flesh, in return for good behavior, the short-term goodies it craves? 

And if so... knowing what I have done and how I did it...

...what else am I capable of overcoming?

What does "traditionally" mean again?

In a NYT article about family caregivers for ill and disabled relatives:

Various surveys have found that 20 million to 50 million family members in the United States provide care that has traditionally been performed by nurses and social workers. Family caregivers supply about 80 percent of the care for ill or disabled relatives, and the need for their services will only rise as the population ages and modern medicine improves its ability to prolong lives.

Do nurses and social workers "traditionally" care for the ill and elderly, and are only now being supplanted by family members and friends?  

Or do families "traditionally" care for their own?  And what about that 80 percent figure?   Is that higher or lower than in the past?  The article doesn't say.

Slacking off in the Japanese corporate world.

The tone of the article is critical,  and Instapundit (h/t)  foreshadows ominously, but this sounds like a healthy trend to me.

 Hidekazu Nishikido, a 24-year-old agent at a staffing company, recently got promoted to help manage a small group of employees. The new job means a higher salary and a better title.
But he isn't happy about it. Now he often works past 10 p.m., leaving him less time with his girlfriend. So Mr. Nishikido flatly told his bosses at R-live Inc. he isn't interested in further promotions.

"My job is important, but it's not what makes me tick," Mr. Nishikido says....

Miya Matsumoto, manager of the laid-back Mr. Nishikido, says she's tried everything -- from screening success-themed films like "The Devil Wears Prada" to throwing after-work drinking parties -- to push her subordinates to be more ambitious. But her team members rarely show interest in bigger responsibilities, she says.... 

Managers are aghast.  How will they ever convince the lowly salarymen to work all night long whenever the company demands it?

The 31-year-old Ms. Matsumoto says she threw herself into her job, often staying overnight in the office to get work done. "Don't you want to get ahead? Don't you want to get rich and drive a nice car?" she prodded Mr. Nishikido recently.

But Mr. Nishikido says he finds Ms. Matsumoto's enthusiasm off-putting. He says he was especially turned off when he learned she had left her sick baby at home with her husband to come to the office (Ms. Matsumoto says work emergencies sometimes must come first.)

"That's definitely not the life I want," Mr. Nishikido says. "No way."

Yeesh, can you blame him?

Finding the time to exercise: the love and marriage model.

Swimming twice a week has been working out pretty well for me.  I have been going on Mondays and Thursdays most weeks, different days if the schedule requires.  I'm optimistic we can increase it to 3x/week after 2x has become an ingrained habit.  This morning as I hurried to my car -- I went before Mark had to leave for work -- I was thinking about magazine articles on "finding the time to exercise."  They always have lots of tips, but never the tip that turned out to do it for me.  For example, from this page:

• "Once you have the motivation, you will have the time... define your goals.  Be very specific and very realistic."  (What, "I want to exercise twice a week" is not specific and realistic enough?)
• "Wake up a half hour earlier."  (We all know how reliable that is with co-sleeping nurslings.)
• Run with a friend.  (OK, so now we have two mothers' busy schedules to coordinate...)

Or from here:

• "Use the childcare at the local gym."  (This sorta works.  It works for two of my children.  But the youngest is despondent when left there, despite plenty of effort on our parts to get her comfortable.  I won't let her cry for an hour, and neither will the YMCA staff, God bless them -- they will fetch a crying child's parents post haste.)
• "Put the baby in a stroller and go for a walk."  (Well, I can do that, but it's hard to get up to a steady pace when there's also a seven- and four-year-old to manage.  It's fine for a pleasant stroll but not for serious exercising.  And what do you do in Minnesota in the winter?)
• "Go for a hike with your baby in a front carrier or sling... Make sure your baby is well supported — a sling is fine for a walk around the block but not for a more rigorous urban walk or a hike through the hills."  (HAHAHA okay this site has lost me, clearly the author doesn't know what she's talking about.  Anyway, again, I love hiking, but all that stopping and waiting and coaxing and cajoling a tired four-year-old is not great for keeping your heart rate up.  The only kind of hiking I've found good for exercising both mom and little kids is a hilly route with a lot of neat rocks to climb on, and the closest one like that is about an hour away.)

(Wait, while I was googling around, I did find a pretty cool stroller gadget that some of you with medium-and-little kids might like.  check this out...)

And then there's all that "you have to do it for yourself... make time for yourself..." me me me talk in a lot of motivational articles.  This has never worked to get me exercising.  For one thing, if my husband takes the children for an hour, there are a hundred things I could do "for my self" besides exercise:  take myself out to eat at a nice restaurant, go to a coffee shop with a good book, get my hair cut, catch up on school planning to buy more time later, blog, etc. 

For another thing, I'm not convinced it's a healthy attitude for me to adopt, the "I need to decide to do this FOR ME" attitude.  For some women, who tend to be very giving, selfless, and generous, yes, cultivating the habit giving one's self permission to do a thing for their own well-being is important.  But some of us, ahem, have never really had difficulties putting ourselves first, and motherhood is the main training ground for the "love your neighbor" thing.  I'm not convinced it's a good idea for me to start doing anything new FOR ME because I'm still hanging on to a lot of FOR ME already and am trying to let go of it.

So.  Here is the tip -- it's really two parts -- that tells how I managed to swim twice a week:

I asked my husband to make a commitment with me, for the good of the family, to give me an hour at the gym twice a week.

I guess it's sort of understandable why magazines with names like, oh, I don't know, SELF, wouldn't be printing tips that amount to "Ask your husband to let you go to the gym."  It is pretty antithetical to the "do it for me" mindset.  I should add, by the way, that it's not "instead of" active whole-family outings like weekend hikes, it's in addition to them.  But let me take this apart a bit, and show you why it worked so well. 

• The first part is the "good of the family" mindset.  Instead of me doing it for me, or even him doing it for me, Mark and I together are making this commitment for our whole family.  It is obviously better for the whole family when I get some exercise every week.   They say it lowers my stress and helps me sleep better:  everybody wins.  It improves my odds of living longer, which is also good for everyone, especially Mark.   It sets an excellent example for the children.  And it helps us meet our family goal of being active together as a family, because often we go to the gym as a family.
• The second part is the asking for a commitment from him.  Mark is a sensible guy and if I ask for something that I really want and that's good for our family, I can trust him to provide it even if it's a sacrifice for him.  But he can't read my mind; he needs me to ask for that particular block time when he must be in charge of the children.   And because it's a recurring commitment, we have to schedule it each week, together. Along with "When are we going to do the shopping this week?" and "Who is going to take Oscar to his Wednesday night class this week?" we have to ask, "Which two days am I going to get to the gym, and what time?"  Once again, this is good for the family -- it's a weekly checking-in between Mark and me, it's a thing I'm grateful he's agreed to do for me, and it's setting a good example for the children.   
• The third part is receiving that commitment from him as a gift and using it the way we agreed on -- giving it back, so to speak.  I asked for those two hours a week for a reason, a reason that was -- I said this before -- "for the good of the family."  I am accountable to that reason.   I can't use them to get a haircut, or go shopping, or sit and read a book (unless on an exercise bike).    No matter how urgent, they aren't allowed to displace this specific commitment that Mark and I have made to each other.  Not only must I use the time for the purpose we planned, I also have to use the time efficiently -- five minutes to get into my suit, fifteen minutes to shower afterwards, means only forty minutes in the pool, and that in turn means that if I want that workout to be a good one, I have to get better at swimming so I can swim more yards in my allotted 4o minutes.

Interestingly enough, this "tip" also happens to fulfill some of the chirpy tips at those other sites.  "Tell another person about your plans."  "Schedule exercise into your week."  "Go to the gym with a friend" (in this case, Mark, who does his time with the kids in the kids' area and then goes to run after I come back from the pool).

And doesn't it seem to be a good metaphor for marriage, too?

Female academia blues.

Speaking of academia blues, Christy sent me another link this week to a  press release from the University of Utah:

April 17, 2008 -- A new study from the University of Utah shows that women in academia have fewer children compared to other professional women -- primarily because it takes longer to achieve the job security of tenure -- and concludes that gender equality in the "ivory tower" has come at a cost.

More accurately, gender equality in the "ivory tower" hasn't happened at all.  If it were equal, effects on males and on females ought not be so different, no?  "Equality" is more about appearances than realities.  You can always strive to improve it, but in the end men and women, on average, are coming from different directions and when you try to apply equal operators you don't get the same effect.

The data shows that professors have fewer children than either doctors or lawyers...female professors have the lowest number of babies of all. Although male faculty are 21 percent less likely than male doctors to have a baby in their households, female faculty are 41 percent less likely than are their female physician counterparts.

Female professors are also more likely than female doctors or lawyers to be separated or divorced. The authors of the study apparently suggest that the structure of the tenure system -- a profoundly anti-young-family structure, I think -- is to blame.   Women are disproportionately affected by anti-family structures, but it's important to remember that involved fathers (and would-be involved fathers) are affected too.

One thing that is coming out of the research is a "Family-Friendly" initiative at University of California-Berkeley -- some of the initiatives described there look like really good first steps.

(Cross-posted at Heart Mind and Strength, where I may have mentioned once that I co-blog.)

Academia blues.

Megan McArdle has a post up about depression (I don't wish to give it the connotation of "bitterness") among professors and other academics.  I'm interested in reading the comments when they appear. 

...[R]elative to other professions, professors don't seem to be having much fun. Everyone in any job has their list of jerks who don't deserve the success they've had, jobs they wish they'd gotten, and amenities they wish their job had. But for many academics, those lists seem to be the bitter cornerstone of their professional lives. I've never seen a group of people--including investment bankers--more obsessed with status....What's the explanation? I can think of several:

1) The money is so low relative to the professions they might have gone into. Journalists also suffer from this bitterness. Interestingly, the more lucrative their current options are, the less bitter the professors seem to be--economists and engineers seem relatively cheerful compared to English and History professors.

2) It's so easy to tell exactly where you rank in the academic hierarchy....

3) It's so hard to switch jobs. ...

4) Academics have few alternative status hierarchies...

5) Academics have virtually no control over where they live ...

I know some of my readers are immersed in academia of one sort or another.  You may remember that until about two-thirds of the way through my own engineering doctorate, I was planning on an academic career myself; somewhere in there, my mind cleared and I saw a lot of the kinds of things Megan mentioned down the road, and realized it was not the kind of life I wanted.   I know several academics personally that Megan's post describes to a T.      

I think Megan's probably right that engineering profs are less depressed than, say, history professors, but I suspect that's less because of the money and more because the nature of engineering means that results are more tangible; even if you're unappreciated, you can point to something you built, found, or made happen, and know that it was a real accomplishment.

UPDATE:  Oh wait, commenter RickM at Volokh Conspiracy found real data:  53 percent of full-time faculty members at universities responded to a survey that they were "very satisfied" with their jobs; another 43 percent, "somewhat satisfied."  Now you just have to decide whether a survey is an accurate measure of job satisfaction.

Celebration.

Last Friday I was just about to call Mark to tell him to pick up some snapper at the store when the phone rang in my hand. 

"Hello?"

"Get the kids ready.  We are going out for sushi."

I checked the caller ID, which assured me that the call was indeed originating from my husband's cell phone.  And it did sound like his voice.

"Mark, it's five-forty-five on a Friday night.  You want to go with three kids to an Uptown restaurant with no reservation?"

He insisted, I insisted he call ahead, and I ran upstairs to wash the yogurt out of my hair and find clean clothes for four people, wondering what was going on.

It turned out that he had a triumph to celebrate at work, one that came with some financial compensation, so we were celebrating! Wow!  A nice surprise for me.  We bundled everyone up, loudly invoked the rarely-used Behavior-Dessert Compensation Clause, and headed out to Stella's Fish Cafe, which is noisy enough to mask sudden outbursts of childlike exuberance and yet fancier than, say, Applebee's.  Also they have an oyster bar.

We had a glass of wine and toasted each other and spent most of the meal (the parts where we weren't escorting a small one to the bathroom or distributing French fries equitably between siblings) grinning at each other.   "Do they know you're just, you know, a regular guy?" I asked Mark. 

"Shhh, keep your voice down," he said.  "Have another oyster." 

This is our joke, but it is short for something serious:  I don't know how I got here sometimes, here with this truly good husband, in this happy family with three children and hope for more, in this circle of friends, in this cozy home, in this just-the-right-sized Midwestern city.  It is not what I expected, not what I deserve, and I am surprised almost every day to wake up and find myself still in it. 

The last time we had something to celebrate about Mark's job was back when I was still in graduate school.  Can't even remember if we took the time to celebrate it.  This time, I had an odd feeling of it being my celebration too.  It's not entirely an illusion.  My being home gives him a certain freedom at work to get things done -- we don't have to juggle competing travel schedules, and he never has to stay home with a sick child, that sort of thing.   Still -- I felt good, and at the same time a little odd about the happiness.   Now why would that be?

When we turn little corners like this, I often expect to find resentment or regret waiting there for me.  Some regret  that the triumphs are Mark's and not mine.  Years ago I thought that at this point I'd be researching, publishing papers, traveling to conferences to explain my work to interested people; or at least teaching engineering or chemistry, if I chose a slower-paced path.  Later I thought maybe I'd see my work in print another way, as a technical editor.  I've stepped off even that slower train now.  There are no accolades waiting for me.  I brace myself just a bit when a reminder comes, even a welcome reminder like my own dear husband having received accolades of his own. 

The weird thing is that ... there isn't any resentment or regret waiting there.  That's the big surprise.   I seem really, truly, to have shrugged it all off like an ill-fitting robe and left it behind.  I keep thinking, But shouldn't I feel bad about this somehow? and it keeps, um, feeling not bad at all.  Free.  Remarkably free, also, to pick it up again someday in the future; but only if I feel like it.   And so all there was that evening was simple pleasure.  Glad to see my sweetie happy.  Glad we can take the whole family out for a nice dinner.  Glad for the woman from the next table (bless her) who stopped to tell me how well-behaved the children were.  Glad to come home with drowsy children to our good house and feel that everything is right, nothing more is wanted, so thankful, so happy to be just where I am.

I'm not giving up blogging for Lent.

Lots of Catholic bloggers do.   Not this year for me, I think.

I do have a plan for Lent, but it's a secret.

If you do away with the yoke,
the clenched fist, the wicked word,
if you give your bread to the hungry,
and relief to the oppressed,

your light will rise in the darkness,
and your shadows become like noon.
The Lord will always guide you,
giving you relief in desert places.

He will give strength to your bones
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water
whose waters never run dry.

You will rebuild the ancient ruins,
build up on the old foundations.
You will be called ‘Breach-mender’,
‘Restorer of ruined houses’.

--- from the Office of Readings for Ash Wednesday:  Isaiah 58:1-12