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Feb. 9th, 2013 04:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionThe sleep thing prevents/kills healthy habits in a couple ways: irregular hours make it next to impossible to anchor an activity to a particular time, exhaustion makes everything seem impossible or pointless. And after watching these undermine various mighty efforts over the years you can add learned helplessness. Atop which there's the ever present temptation to defiantly own your crappy, erratic lifestyle by (e.g.) associating routines with soul-deadening predictability or conformity.
I didn't always make lists. The habit started when I went on a fitness kick in my early twenties and started recording meals and exercise. Previously I don't think I'd ever even written out a grocery list. I liked how well this worked that I (for the first time) decided to regulate my reading, using the same notebook, and in this way got through Proust, War and Peace, Anna Karenina - novels I'd long been meaning to finish but lacked the attention span to. And still lack - I don't think I've reached the end of an 800 page book since 2001, not counting collections or novel series. I became a kind of monster of focus and fitness for a couple of years there, and wonder now if I went a little crazy. There was definitely a high involved in being able to accomplish real goals for the first time, only possible because I lived alone and didn't need to be anywhere.
I think when I list books now I'm often trying to recapture the happiness of those years - I've had other happy years, of course, but not of that type. It was a highly abnormal way to live, a sort of monk's existence despite overlapping with my drinking years, but it permitted me my nearest approach to certain kinds of normalcy. Sleep was only an issue in relation to the outside world.
I remember taking measures about sleep even then, though, mostly because of exercise - the good swimming pool was only open at certain hours, the bike trails by the river were most pleasant just after dawn. I had a dark quilt blocking my bedroom window for about four years. I must have unconsciously been aware that sleep is temperature-based, as I kept it like a refrigerator in there, controlled my body heat with bedding layers.
It was lonely was the one but decisive problem. When I make to-do lists now I don't expect to get far with them. But I like the projection. Reminds me of when I could do what I told myself, when the future was an extension of the present.
I didn't always make lists. The habit started when I went on a fitness kick in my early twenties and started recording meals and exercise. Previously I don't think I'd ever even written out a grocery list. I liked how well this worked that I (for the first time) decided to regulate my reading, using the same notebook, and in this way got through Proust, War and Peace, Anna Karenina - novels I'd long been meaning to finish but lacked the attention span to. And still lack - I don't think I've reached the end of an 800 page book since 2001, not counting collections or novel series. I became a kind of monster of focus and fitness for a couple of years there, and wonder now if I went a little crazy. There was definitely a high involved in being able to accomplish real goals for the first time, only possible because I lived alone and didn't need to be anywhere.
I think when I list books now I'm often trying to recapture the happiness of those years - I've had other happy years, of course, but not of that type. It was a highly abnormal way to live, a sort of monk's existence despite overlapping with my drinking years, but it permitted me my nearest approach to certain kinds of normalcy. Sleep was only an issue in relation to the outside world.
I remember taking measures about sleep even then, though, mostly because of exercise - the good swimming pool was only open at certain hours, the bike trails by the river were most pleasant just after dawn. I had a dark quilt blocking my bedroom window for about four years. I must have unconsciously been aware that sleep is temperature-based, as I kept it like a refrigerator in there, controlled my body heat with bedding layers.
It was lonely was the one but decisive problem. When I make to-do lists now I don't expect to get far with them. But I like the projection. Reminds me of when I could do what I told myself, when the future was an extension of the present.
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Date: 2013-02-09 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 07:29 pm (UTC)The origins of my list-making are similar. And now they're a means of refining to a dire point the otherwise vague and baggy cloud of things that should be done.
I agree with