On Time, Exercise, and Baseball

This past week has been busy because of several developments: the baseball season has started; suddenly I have had a jump in the number of clients asking for sessions, some of them people I had not heard from for awhile; and lastly, on Monday I joined the JCC, the Jewish Community Centre, a mere two short blocks from our new home. Since, I have gone over each morning for a class or for a spell on a treadmill and a bicycle. Two of the classes were a relatively meditative form of yoga, very pleasant. 

The third, entitled Fitness Fundamentals, had nothing meditative about it whatsoever. It was an hour of flat-out rapid fire cardio exercise, the most vigorous workout I have had in decades. I kept looking at the clock, thinking that I would hang in until a half hour had past, then, that I would give it another few minutes to see what else the instructor would ask of us, then, that since we were promised a period down on the mat, I’d wait to see if perhaps it would be a restful interlude – it wasn’t. I stopped a couple of times as I started to feel dizzy. Betty, the instructor cautioned me to keep moving even if only slowly to prevent “blood pooling.” I stayed to the (bitter?) end, perhaps only out of some instinct of pride or of embarrassment to be seen leaving prematurely. What was fun at the beginning gradually felt something like a self-imposed torture, however. At the end several women came to me to encourage me: one said that it takes three to six months to internalize all of the moves of the class in order to feel in sync; another told me she had been doing that class for 15 years and that if this was my first time I had done spectacularly well; one other advised me to let the instructor know that I had stopped because I was dizzy. Betty also made a point of talking with me, congratulating me and encouraging me. So I will return. I know that it will be good for me on lots of levels, so regular self-torture, here I come. It is quite possible though that without the kindness of those women, I might have opted for slinking away with my tail firmly tucked between my legs, seeking only the gentle and peaceful forms of exercise available. Who knows, I may be ready for Zumba in a few months!

The baseball season presents a challenge for me: I get drawn into watching the almost daily games because I love the game and feel for my poor benighted Blue Jays who struggle from one season to another. At the same time it is an enormous expenditure of time and focus. I sit here in my beautiful living room/library (because for once the expanse of shelving allows our books a common site) looking at the titles and thinking how I long to be perusing them, all the while distracted by my concern for the game. I find more and more that I do not have a great capacity for multi-tasking. I can’t read in anything like a thoughtful fashion, nor for that matter do any writing, while there are other things going on. It’s a funny thing about the leisure of retirement or semi-retirement: though objectively there is more time available to one, there never really seems to be enough to satisfy the demands of all that needs to be done or that one would ideally like to do. I keep having this fantasy of being a more sociable person, but the work and time to convert this into anything like reality seems beyond me. Maybe my sociability has to find its outlet in these letters that I like to send to you from my new perch in the (south) Annex.

P.S. I should add that I did begin one piece of writing this week that because of a lack of concentrated time I have been unable to complete. It relates to thoughts I have been having about the importance to a child's sense of agency to allow some latitude for mischief and for dissident expression. This topic has more to do with a blog that I started a few years ago called Thoughts on Psychotherapy -- the link is www.thoughtsonpsychotherapy.blogspot.com for anyone interested. I haven't looked at it for quite some time but if I finish the above piece I will post it there.