22 in 22: Slouchery, Tracking and Mindfulness

The next three goals on my list of 22 in 22 are:

#16 Improve my posture

More than twenty years ago, I took an adult ballet class. I remember very very clearly thinking, about our instructor, “That woman is so beautiful.”

There is nothing that makes a girl feel more like a clod than a woman in her seventies who stands straight as an arrow and has more grace than Grace Kelly herself.

During the class, I would observe her, trying to imitate her grace and her elegance. This, naturally, only exacerbated the nagging, constant feeling I had that I was just a very very small child trapped in a woman’s body.

I would try to figure out what made her so beautiful. She was in her seventies. Her skin was wrinkly. Her hair was white. She was neither thin, nor tall.

Why was she so breathtaking?

Gravitas is the answer, although I had never heard that word at the time. Today, when I picture Gravitas, I picture that wrinkly, white-haired woman.

I am about 40 years too late to be able to have that kind of grace on the stage. The white hair though? I am well on my way. The wrinkles will come when they are ready. But I am certain that with some work, I could improve my posture a little bit.

This year, I want to be intentional about finding ways to improve my posture. Standing straight doesn’t only look beautiful, but it feels beautiful.

It feels beautiful, but it’s uncomfortable as the dickens. I want to change that in 2022.

#17 Track the trackables

This is just a continuation of what I have always done: make sure I’m drinking enough water, making sure I’m active enough to keep my heart healthy. The only unpredictable element here is the Are You Pregnant or Is! It! Menopause gameshow turn my life has taken. All the more reason to be tracking my monthly cycle. And hey. There’s an app for that!

#18 Eat mindfully and with pleasure

Last summer, I took a foray into figuring out how to enjoy food and not just put up with food.

My solution was to, for the space of the summer, concentrate on making pretty food. Pretty, meaning colorful, meaning attractive, meaning visually appealing.

I still hate food. I hate cooking. I hate getting my hands dirty. But I did learn from my summer experiment that I was capable of taking pleasure in food if I viewed it as an artistic experiment and not a way to provide fuel for myself. (We gotta know our own why, right? Fueling my body doesn’t make it to my top three reasons to eat. Let’s see: Boredom, Stress, Loneliness, THEN comes Hunger.)

The sticking point with this goal is, of course, that it takes way more time to make pretty food than it does to make boring food. Not just in the preparation time, but also in the intentional, out-of-my-way efforts I have to make to go buy the dried white mulberries and other random colorful dried fruit they have at the organic food shop, or the pretty colored fruits and veggies I have never heard of before.

If I’m serious about this (and I am serious. Enough to put it on my 22 in 22), then I need to develop a routine around getting to the fruitstand and the organic food shop.

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We’re almost there! Only four more points to cover!!!! It will only have taken me three weeks to articulate my goals for 2022. At that rate, the year will be over before I even get started!!