The Not Zero

Last week’s latte earned me a few tender comments and replies along the lines of…

“Are you bragging about your procedureless process?”

No.

So much of what I write is indeed first person narrative, and so it can sound like I alternate between two favorite pastimes: narcissism and self-deprecating humor.

To be crystal clear, my favorite pastimes are walking and listening to audiobooks, and hammocking with paper books. Close third is locating my person adjacent to coffee brewing, fourth is the way Epsom salts disintegrate between my palms when I’m adding them to a bath. My values include humility and honesty and gratitude, and my personal expression of these things.

I am a skilled practitioner of judgement (both self and other directed), and I spend a lot of time perplexed by the paradox of feeling like I’m pretty good at a number of things and simultaneously a sham at everything.

Case in point, a supervisor in a previous job once called me into her office after a long work day (I worked 4 10’s at the time), closed the door behind her, and invited me to sit on the loveseat across from her couch.

In this sort of circumstance I nearly always believe I am being fired (although I truly have never been). I quickly itemized every mistake I had ever made in that role (another hobby!) but couldn’t see how spelling mistakes or being two minutes late would lead to me being fired on a cozy couch? She asked me - directly, and with modest urgency - about my fitness routine, and if she might hire me after hours to coach her on hers.

My other hobbies include study and training, and at the time I was indeed a credentialed group fitness and personal fitness trainer, so this wasn’t bananas.

But she wasn’t asking me about sets and reps to improve her racquetball game (which is fortunate because I wouldn’t have had terribly useful advice), she wanted mostly to know how I kept going after the long days of social work-type work - hospitals and mobile homes, advocacy that took me to visit clients in prison and rehab and hospice.

I’ll share with you what I told her, and then the real answer if you’re game.

“Not zero,” I said.

In the same way that my siblings in sobriety chant one day at a time, fixating on the one, and my compadres in Yogas adhere to the now, I was adamant that before I went to bed every single day, I would be able to claim one moment. One action. One meal or movement or Nidra or anything that was in service and reverence for my own sweet autonomous being.

I knew at the time that once I landed home in my nest, it would take an actual birth to get me to leave again. In those days, I would not go home before the gym. Sometimes I would spend 10 minutes leisurely peddling the recumbent stationary bike in lieu of the 28 minute elliptical slog I had planned. Once I remember walking in, changing clothes, doing one pull up, and heading home.

Fine.

The pattern was the thing.

Twice I have fallen out of this pattern, the pattern of not zero, but it is my central tenet.

Is it for you?

I can’t know.

Your tendency might lean heavily into overdrive, and maybe your mantra is to coast more frequently, but I suppose you just need to adjust the object of your counting, not the mantra.