Thursday, February 15, 2024

I missed Ash Wednesday

I'm so divorced from church life these days that Ash Wednesday (and Mardi Gras before it) came and went without my even noticing. If you're embarking on your Lenten journey, well, good luck to you.*

As for the cross I bear, or the yoke I wear, I've been doing the stairs faithfully on a MWF schedule, but the distance walking (TRS schedule) has barely been happening. There may be a psychological component: on the days I'm supposed to go walking (these are supposed to be morning walks that start around 5:30 or 6:00 a.m.), I feel so relieved not to be doing the stairs that I just sleep in. 

But the stairs thing has evolved from hate-hate to love-hate: I'm finding it easier to wake up early to do the stairs—which I'm almost eager to do despite the gasping effort—so maybe I should go back to a stairs-every-day paradigm, but setting my stairs maximum to half a staircase (up to the 14th floor) on walk days. Half a staircase is enough to get the heart pumping and wake me up, so I could conceivably do that, then go out walking right after.

Where I really need to improve is when I go to sleep. Getting to bed before midnight is hard, and what often happens is that I'll go to bed after midnight, get a few hours' sleep in, wake up early to do the stairs, then crawl back into bed for SleepPart Two. It feels comfortable to get back into bed, but I know this isn't the healthiest behavior: it's probably better to sleep an unbroken six or seven hours than to do what Im currently doing. Ideally, I should be in bed and asleep by 10:30 p.m.

Maybe that will be my Lenten discipline: ironing out the kinks in my sleep schedule. Easter this year is Sunday, March 31. We have our work cut out for us.

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*I see that the convergence of Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day has resulted in a lot of Barbenheimer jokes all across the internet.



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