I continued to meditate and exercise every day at home (but more on that elsewhere). I walked a bit, in accordance with our current lockdown rules. Having lived in this area – as a non-driver – as long as I have though, I’m already intimately familiar with every street within walking distance of my home. That’s ok, because there’s still plenty to look out for – cats in windows, interesting plants, strange cars, or other previously unnoticed details of a house. Sometimes a house is suddenly, completely gone. It’s harder to find interesting things to noice about newer contructions, though I suppose they’ll find a way to seem “quaint” in a few decades’ time. I at least managed to make myself use one of my other cameras while I walked – the eternal struggle of not just using the iPhone is real.

One of the things I thought I’d do was to catch up on a backlog of technical work for various home systems and/or projects, but I found myself wanting to avoid the room I work from – I’m on holiday, after all, and spending hours at the same desk I’d be at during work time felt…unnecessary. Instead, I read a few books, listened to a lot of music, watched a few old movies, took far too many photos of the cats and did some gardening.

There’s plenty of other things I should have done, mostly around contacting friends or home improvements but it’s no secret that, as with many of us right now, I’m tired, and so just having some personal space feels like the best thing I could do for myself.

What was the best part? All of those nothing, in-betweeny moments. Noticing the sunlight on our sleeping cats, feeling the sun on my face in the back garden, and sitting alone in a room with nothing in particular to do.

All of that feels like enough, now, and it feels time to return to the world. Here goes the re-entry…

#photography #life #walks

This was a post from Cos.

You can follow this blog on the Fediverse at @cos@apintandaparma.club or subscribe in your RSS reader.

Years ago I spent a lot of time thinking about getting a Nintendo Wii in order to use Wii Fit, but never acted on it. Somewhere around the start of 2020 a work colleague in China told us about Ring Fit Adventure for the Nintendo Switch. “Alright,” I thought, “this time I'll really do it” – it felt like an easy way for me to fill in a few extra days a week where I didn't make it to the gym. I ordered the game and bought a Switch (my first gaming console in nearly 16 years) in late January, just before Everything Changed^TM...

...which turned out to be excellent timing – maybe I should've bought a lottery ticket, too? As Melbourne's #lockdown settled in, I was able to start an irregular daily habit of a Ring Fit workout, which eventually settled into a proper daily routine. Today marked my 100th day of Ring Fit Adventure – I've already finished the main part of the game, but it lets you do another round of all the levels, just for the exercise, which I'm still working my way through. The game itself? It's basically a typical RPG but when it comes to battling the monsters, you have to do various workouts. This would've been perfect for 20-year old me, who really could've done with some kind of regular exercise habit.

So why do this? I'm stuck Working from Home as plenty of us are, and we really are staying home, apart from our single grocery shopping expedition each weekend. Doing this regular exercise at home stops me descending into an anxiety void, which I'd probably try filling with (more) food.

I've become a little more accepting of routine as I get older – I've come to appreciate that it's something you can hold onto when uncertainty hits, and so another routine that's been helping me out is 15 minutes of meditation each morning. The first thing I do after getting dressed. I've racked up 124 consecutive days of Headspace since just before lockdown commenced (another irregular habit that I've managed to make regular), and our cats have learnt that I become a comfortable place to sit while I'm doing it.

I hope you're all finding ways to keep going, somehow, and many many thanks to 冯炜 for telling me about Ring Fit at the right time.

#fitness #RingFitAdventure #NintendoSwitch #life #stories #100

This was a post from Cos.

You can follow this blog on the Fediverse at @cos@apintandaparma.club or subscribe in your RSS reader.