Spring plans

This last week has really brought it home to me how little stamina and endurance I have physically. I collapsed on Saturday night in post-match exhaustion, while people younger and older than me partied hard and fast into the night. I had one bourbon and coke and was asleep by 9.30!!

Not that I am interested in that whole going out and getting smashed deal anymore (my liver withers at the thought), but it's not every day your team wins an unexpected premiership, and surely one evening out of my life I could have stayed out till 10 o'clock and had three drinks? Surely?

My life is so different these days to what it used to be before I got sick. Slower, quieter. Which is okay, you know? I think I needed to be slower and quieter, so it's a good thing. But still, I feel so out of the loop compared to the people I see around me. Compared to them I feel like some kind of crazy invalid who needs to live her life in Nana Nap mode, you know? I can't believe people who have children and work full time - how on earth do they do it? But still, living life in Nana Nap mode feels right to me now. Fosters poetry :) Living on slower speed is an addiction that you very quickly adapt to.

I can relate to people who have had cancer and things like that who are getting back on the road to recovery. It feels rather daunting. I am able to work, but 20 hours a week is enough at the moment. Able to exercise, except anything harder than walking and I feel trepidation. Able to vaguely keep my house in order, if you ignore the dust bunnies and the piles of clothes and the piles of dishes and the four foot weeds growing out the back and the shower only being cleaned once every six weeks at best.

I am a bit disappointed that I haven't gained greater stamina since I have been well, but unfortunately that doesn't come handed down from on high. You have to build it up. And so, with Spring sprung, I am coming to the realisation that the idea rolling around in my head of getting some sort of v-e-r-y slow-starting endurance training going is maybe a timely one. Which means some sort of glutamine from the health food shop. Which means dusting off my bike, pumping up the completely flat tyres, and going for a ride. It also means going swimming, which means wearing bathers in public, but I cannot worry too much about such things :)

It's scary, the thought of doing those two physical things, even though I enjoy both of them. And even though swimming equates to saunas if I choose the right place, and saunas rock. One of my favourite sauna memories is of the one in Footscray. When I entered the husky wooden box, behold, a black man sitting in his bathers with his eyes closed. The sweat all standing out in individual droplets all over his body ...

Sorry, got carried away there for a minute :) Where was I? Yes. Hmm. Stamina. I know how tough it is to build up your endurance. I'm fighting against some irrational part of me, the part that spent most of those 6+ years I was ill having to learn what it meant personally to pace myself. Now the goalposts have changed again and I will have learn what it means personally to pace myself now I am well and reasonably healthy. The irrational part is fearful that I will somehow overdo it and crash. Even though crashing is not something that has happened to me for quite a few years. But it's still there, the irrationality, the fear. Nothing for it but to just accept its existence and work around it, I guess.

So, this is my plan cooking up slowly in my head for Spring. It feels a bit daunting. But then so do many things new.

I am also seriously considering taking a pottery class. It's one of those things that feels like I desperately want to do it but a lot of that desire is subconscious or repressed or something. I don't know if that makes sense, but all I know is that I have a renewed appreciation for the fact that I can be hanging out dribbling to do something but keep ignoring it. And pottery classes is something I've been hanging out dribbling to do for years and years, and not just because of wraithily imprinted romantic Patrick Swayze visions :)

(Sheesh, I sound a bit man-mad, don't I? Black men in saunas, Patrick Swayze. But it's just an eye thing, you know? Happy to look, but not interested in touching. Because that's the third thing I am looking forward to revelling in this Spring and Summer, my own singleness. It's taken a while, but the thought of anything else is a total turn-off to me right now.)

How about you? Has the change in seasons thrown up some new plans or ideas that you are considering, new areas to walk into, new things that are swirling around in your head and congealing into something, some new door you're thinking, "Hmm, should I?"