Inclusive fitness includes our whole self
I think I might have stumbled upon a caffeine balance. Interestingly it's called ' listening to myself', and it's not actually very hard. When I get up I take into account how I'm feeling mentally, physically and emotionally and I think about what I have to do today and how long my day might be. This thought process takes me the same amount of time it takes to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen counter where my electric tea kettle is. My apartment is not a castle so this takes maybe 8 seconds. Once there, I choose how much chemical stimulation I want to experience.
Lately it's been caffeine on teaching days, caffeine free on non teaching days. But sometimes my non teaching days are full days of computer work so...chemical boost it is. Since I don't have an addictive system, switching on and off every few days has been fine. I also got back on board with the supplements that I do think are doing anything after spending two weeks resenting them for not being a cure-all.
I'm lucky my work days are not always concurrent so I can cycle on and off. Obviously if you have a long days work, 5 days a week, my plan is less useful for you. Also if you have kids, or nagging cats that immediately need your full attention right as you become conscious, that 8 seconds of self reflection might have to happen later (while you're peeing?). BUT it brings me back to one of my favorite teachings of Buddhism: habit is death.
I heard this while a freshman in college who was very impressionable and very miserable and very much seeking every possible way to be less miserable (except drugs and booze which honestly I probably would have had so much more fun being miserable than I was being very miserable and also ascetic). This phrase rolled around in my mind for years because I mistook ritual for habit and was discovering that routine, ritual, was and is, very grounding. Like everyone in their 20s I was in a constant self-doubt-spiral so of course I thought what I was doing, how I was beginning to express my adulthood, was WRONG and thus I was wrong and everything was and always would be WRONG. SIGH! and also why did I care so much about this one little Buddhist phrase?!
At some point it dawned on me that routine is not habit. Routine is choice. It's preference. It's kind of who you are. It's your likes and dislikes made manifest. Your you-ness in a million little detailed preferences.
Habit is death because habit is without choice. There's a reason addicts call addiction their habit. It's not a place you live with your eyes open and your feet on the ground. It's a caul. It's a loss of self. There are no doors or exits there unless you make your own, often with a sledgehammer. It reminds me of one of my formatively favorite movies. The irony being the 'choice' described is numbing by a different means, but that's Irvine Welsh being clever for you.
I have always shirked same-ness, like schedule, consistency, predictability. This has made my life very challenging, a bit of a knife edge at times, and very interesting. There was a time I wanted to literally join the circus, traveling the world in a caravan doing physically challenging things sounds fantastic. There are times I wonder how I strayed so far from that.
Maybe there's a bohemian way to live in the day to day. Maybe there's a way to keep shifting the internal and external playing field to invite wonder. Maybe there's a way to continuously question our path without actually turning the wheels towards every town big enough to support a big top.
We are so used to 'shoulds' and 'recommendations'. Everything is trying to make us better. I don't want to be better. I want to be more full. I want to jump in the cold ocean when a big part of me wants to sit inside in the warmth instead. I want to leave the airport without totally knowing where I'm going. I want to know why I do things and if those things are the things I want to do.
I hope there's a place you can learn about yourself by picking just a bit at a thing you always do. Maybe you can uncover the richness in it's routine, maybe you'll discover that it's a dead-end you've been pacing, not realizing you'd reached its end. I think we find ourselves in this minutia. I think those bread crumbs lead to our biggest selves. I think if we can't take it with us, we might as well be free enough to leave it all behind.
I think practicing choosing what's in my cup is supporting a practice of making choices. These choices are where our lives are lived, I want to live in that aliveness, all cup metaphors and questions about caffeine welcome.