I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
Last night, my daughter and I each made our dinners — she grilled chicken, I threw together a (very!) spicy green chile-potato-chicken soup — and afterward we decided we’d go swim laps at the nearby rec center. We normally do our weekend lap swim on Sunday mornings but we both had a sudden burst of motivation to do it Saturday night instead.
We both feel motivated to swim or workout at the gym partly because we shower in the women’s locker room after, and somehow that’s a great treat. At home, I’m not really big on showers. In fact, sometimes I postpone them for longer than I should. But there is something delightful about the quick progression from swimming in the cold pool to taking a hot shower and getting my hair washed before coming home.
I’ve been slowly increasing how far I go in the pool, and increasing how much freestyle I do.1 I hurt my shoulder in a ski accident last November and didn’t swim through the winter and most of the summer. Recently I started swimming again and it helped work out the frozen shoulder I’ve been suffering from.2 I had to start with mostly breaststroke and kicking when I got back in the pool, but now I can do freestyle and backstroke with only a little stiffness and pain. I got to 1000 yards, 40 yards, more than half a mile, which felt like a success.
I’ve been swimming and working out on the cardio machines lately three or four times a week. It feels good to be building strength, flexibility, and lung capacity again. Just in time for ski season! Though I’m not sure whether I’ll be going this year or not. I’m still shy of it after the accident.
Varieties of relational experience
I was thinking last night as we showered after swimming, “this is a time to cherish. It won’t last forever.” While my manual How to Lead a Successful Late Midlife says “You must be partnered, ideally married, and living with your husband”, the reality of my life is quite different, and possibly more satisfying and joyful for it.
In a recent Tarot spread, I drew Ten of Cups and Three of Cups alongside each other. This was in a spread about the oppressive manual that some part of me wants to live by. Ten of Cups was in “the Enforcer” position, while Three of Cups, “the Cost of Adherence.”
Ten of Cups shows exactly what my manual demands for me, while Three of Cups suggests, metaphorically, what the cost of getting that might be losing or simply deprioritizing the joyful relationships I have not with a romantic partner, but with those closest to me. I always read the Three of cups as showing myself and my two daughters, in joyful communion. Because I’m not married and not dating anyone, I can fully experience the relationships I have with them. This card also stands in for my close relationships with the rest of my family: my two sisters, my parents.
Our society is so focused on the marital bond that sometimes people get the message that other relationships are lesser, both in how they satisfy and in how they should be prioritized.
Alternative living arrangements
I’ve been watching the HBO show Big Love lately, which features a husband with three wives living in Utah. They don’t live in a polygamist cult but rather in a compound of three houses with a shared backyard. They hide their polygamy because it is legally and societally disallowed.
The relationships among the wives are just as important as the romantic relationships that exist between the husband and each woman. They call each other “sister wives” and must collaborate closely together to care for the compound and their children who live with them in it.
There are many varieties of structuring a life in a way that are sustaining and joyful.
upcoming This week
I’m happy that I don’t have much on my calendar this week except my daily habits: writing, trading & portfolio management, artmaking, home maintenance, gardening, walking dogs.
But at the same time I feel lacking in any bigger purpose. Perhaps that’s because for so many months I’ve been focused on options trading and then long-term portfolio management. It took all my attention and energy. Now I’ve got that largely settled, I can think about a new big project. I’ll write about it tomorrow.
- To be precise, how much front crawl I am doing, as freestyle is the racing category and the crawl is the stroke everyone chooses as the fastest way to get down the pool. ↩︎
- Frozen shoulder is a condition common in women over age 40 in which the joint becomes painful and stiff due to a tightening of the connective tissue capsule. ↩︎