Thursday 5/11/23
Up until three, then up every half hour or so until seven because I'd just had so much to drink. Juice and water, of course, not alcohol. Aching, chills, congestion, cough. That wasn't a productive or restful night.
I get all of these videos now on my phone of people showing the right way to do an array of exercises. This has made me want to do mountain climbers which I have not done before and see if I can't work that into the routine. I'd also like to get back to some of my hill sprints along with all of the stairs. I start thinking like this and I want to do a big slate of physical activity but I also know in another day or two I should be myself again and it would be better not to monkey around and make anything worse.
That is hard for me, though, because I feel restless and inefficient. When I am as I should be, I'm doing everything every day. Creating, fighting, tending to these pages, and working out, hard. There is a certain amount of inter-relatedness.
I found another player who finished in the top ten in a category in baseball for twenty-one years, though it's a kind of obscure stat. That is, it's not like stolen bases or on base percentage. Cy Young finished in the top ten in bases on balls per 9 IP twenty-one times.
How does one find such stats? Pretty simple. Call to mind someone who played for a long time and who either had no dip in their play or had the market cornered, so to speak, on a particular skill, even as the rest of their game declined (as in Rickey Henderson's case).
When one writes as one should write, it's like one doesn't write and that works simply happen. They are there. One day the work exists as completed. It should almost feel like cheating. You have to be in the constant state of creation and a regular state of what one might call the tending to. Then there is the work. It emerges, steps forward, says, "Okay, I have been completed, I exist as I should now, hello." It shouldn't be a formal decision to labor over something.
I can work on one thing at once and nothing else for however long a stretch as I wish, but because there is so much else that I know I can turn to or work on, it's also not like I'm really laboring on the one thing. I might step away, put some words into something else (or read back a single pack or half of one; touch up a solitary paragraph or two), and then that thing is done. Again, almost as without having been done. It just is, and there it is.
But that idea of the constant state of creation (which is a way of being) has much to do with this, and that's a whole bigger thing. When it's in place, though--or, I should say, when that's how you are--this is how work--and a lot of work--is finished. It is finished via happening. Not formal laboring.
