To Good Health

So much to catch you folks up on. Hoping to write a few short posts this week with pictures of what I have been up to in wintery January, just to get us all back in the routine of the blog again.

Had a wonderful visit with Cameron. He stayed with me here for a week-and-a-half, soaking up all the outdoor winter activities with the same amped-up sense of adventure I approach the world with. We arrived here on a Saturday, and on Sunday we were out skating on the clear ice of big Gun Lake, which had just frozen earlier in the week. At some points near the edge of the water you could see all the way to the bottom of the lake! It was amazing, but not for the faint of heart.

The lake creaked and groaned under our strides, and an arrow of swans that had called the lake home for the past couple of months took off over our heads in their quest south.

The sun was out and the clear black ice was dappled with amazing frost flowers, a rare occurrence that happens when the ice temperature is at least ten to fifteen degrees warmer than the outside air temperature. When the cold, humid air saturated with water vapour hits the warmer air just above the ice, it condenses as hoar-frost crystals by the process of deposition, which is when a substance moves right from the gas phase to the solid phase, without becoming a liquid first.

Good fodder for our snow science unit anyways, and speaking of snow and science/mathematics, check out this guy: Simon Beck. He was once a marathon runner who can no longer run long distance, so instead he heads out on snowshoes for six hours a day to make the most brilliant, large-scale geometric designs, all on snowshoes! We have become inspired, and are doing our own snowshoe art for the upcoming Winterfest at Little Gun Lake on Feb. 9.

But I digress. I also took Cameron on many wanders around town with Sanford, to Wednesday night hockey, on a cross-country ski outing by moonlight on the set track around Little Gun Lake. I even took him ski-touring up Sunshine, and needless to say he is absolutely in love with the place. He made it safely back to Tofino earlier this week to continue with his winter surfing, but plans on visiting again in early March once his house-sitting stint is over on his way back for the farming season in Saskatchewan.

Since turning 30 I feel like I have spent more time in ill health than at any point in the past three decades. In my last post I was talking about how I am getting to know myself, but this is a never-ending, lifelong pursuit, and new lessons are presenting themselves all the time. At the moment I am learning how valuable my health is, and in paying attention to the flus and colds and sore joints I feel like I am learning to slow down a little. Slowly, slowly learning this, as I have revved through life on overdrive. Those of you who know my parents can probably understand where parts of this stem from. I tend to pursue life on high octane all the time, the midnight oil burning, multiple projects on the go, playing strenuous sports outside. The knuckle of my right index finger that I smashed chopping wood is still swollen and red, and I think I’m just going to have to get used to it being a little misshapen and bulbous. I can bend it easily, no pain, and even pressing on it feels fine, so if I must submit to a little deformity as a constant reminder to take my time, then I'll take it! There’s nothing I can do about it, so I better just be more careful from now on.

I also hurt my neck, re-aggrivating an old snowboarding injury while playing hockey last week. The massage therapist was up doing treatments here in Gold Bridge over the weekend, and thankfully I had an appointment, but it is still a little sore so I am taking things easy. And this week I was feeling like a sinus infection was coming on: hurt to chew, felt like my left eyeball was going to pop out of my skull, painful to the touch all over my cheek. Looked up some natural remedies for it, which I followed with a type-A dedication, and feeling much improved today. Trying to take it easy guilt-free, which feels wonderful when it works. 

In light of my new-found mortality this week I’ve been taking more rest time to myself after work, not answering emails until days later, letting the phone ring until the machine picks it up, not forcing myself to create when I feel so tired. I think my body is trying to tell me that it is feeling generally run down, my mind ablaze with thoughts at all hours of the day, working at a busy job and then trying to work on after school projects all the time in addition to all the planning and communicating related to said job. I am trying to learn the lesson all this injury and illness is bringing me, learning to let go of the high expectations of myself that I have been carrying around from my upbringing in a society that seems to think that productivity is only measurable by actually producing finished things. I think I need to start being more accepting of doing “nothing” once in a while, of letting projects sit half-finished, of spending more time listening to music, watching movies and reading for their own sake, rather than focusing on producing creative projects all the time. After all, I already have a more than full-time job, so time to give myself a break and a solid rest, to invite a little more balance into my life rather than always pushing myself at everything I do. Had a great chat with Cameron about pressure, and how I like to seek out pressure, taking on more and more responsibility until I am highly pressurized and justifying the stress to myself by saying "I work best under pressure". But it is certainly what I am used to, and breaking the habit of seeking it out is going to take some hard work at letting go. I'm sure many of you out there can relate, and with the advent of emails and the internet we are all more bombarded with information and external pressures than ever before. And we are more anxious and charged-up and stressed out. More full of external expectations too, and I want to become more clear about my own expectations of myself, rather than taking on the expectations others might have of me. I want to welcome a little more balance into my own life, and that is the lesson I am trying to learn now.

Anyway, more to report of course, but I’ll save it for later in the weekend. Thanks for sticking with me in spite of the long hiatuses in my posting recently. I really do enjoy writing here and feel refreshed and ready to get back into the routine of it. It's a quiet activity that calms my own mind, so it's a good activity to engage in on the couch :) Have still been working on the book project, slowly, slowly, but that's okay. Learning to let go of expectations and to let the words come, a constant battle, always.