my mind does not live in my head

one

Well, I may as well say the least cute thing I’ve said this year. I suppose I’m at the age now where if something feels off, it’s like, “Well, how is my gut doing?”Did I sleep? Did I move? Did I put anything green near my body? Do I have a good reason for the things I keep doing???

&

why do I still call _______ when _______ has nothing to add to my life,

or I to theirs?

Oh, it’s all learning, isn’t it, all carving us into gold? I’ve come to believe there is no world in which you do the things you want to do at the level you want to do them, while existing on the diet of everything we are fed.

Everything we are fed.

Everything we are feeding ourselves. Yes, let me bring this into the active. I am ready to consume more slowly, more intentionally. That is the job of the year, the design and maintenance of the bodymachine and everything else is downstream of these choices. The demands on us have gone up, and the wild, wide world has gotten more hostile to the body, and it’s happening at the same time.

With that said, the response to the aforementioned cannot be casual. For me, it has to be holistic, and yes, at times must veer toward the obsessive. I say this constantly; I know I do, and it’s not to beat ya over the head. It is to keep reminding myself (and us) out loud that,

without the green spaces, without getting serious about what goes in my body, without the sleep and the movement, I do not stand a Chance In Hell of showing up the way the future that I want requires. Or this present, the thing that we are standing inside. Planning this way is the floor I stand on to do everything. Anything.

&

Speaking of standing,

the quite sedentary life, the one some of us are primed to live as writers & artists, which is supposed to require sitting for hours, works against the very organ I am sitting still to use. God! Sorry to be all wellness coded, but it’s biology. I cannot think my way out of a dysregulated body. Oh, I have tried. It does not work!

My containers are forced smaller now; the window in which I do things, the amount I take on, things I say yes to, deep-work time, all smaller, all more deliberate. I have given up some things I used to consider fun. I have rearranged my days around the unsexy (and yet sexy-in-the-end I guess) business of keeping myself well enough to

well, deal.

My mind does not live in my head; it’s full-body. Let’s say that a decade or so ago, I may have done a few anti-serotonin-making things. For a long time, I did not treat myself particularly well, because I did not know I needed to, or because surviving took everything and there was nothing left over for nurture, for tending.

So yes, I care about the gut, which is in constant private chatter with my brain and vagus nerve, a literal physical line between the stomach and the skull 🖤 Mostly, what I practice now is, in part, soft correction. Necessary.

two

am so in love with this

Life will never stop amazing us, enthralling us, and fucking us over. So much of modern life is anti-life.