Finding new rhythms

One of the frustrating things about my current health issues is that my instinctive cues about what my body needs are often unreliable. My appetite can be bad, I occasionally deal with bouts of insomnia, and it can be hard to tell how much activity my body will tolerate until it's too late. For that reason, I've been exploring things I can easily measure at home to help me figure out what my body needs at any given time. I believe I have figured out how to use that data to identify good times to eat, appropriate sizes of meals, good times to be more active, durations of activity my body will tolerate at that time, and good times to rest. For now I will just say that I have had some very encouraging results using this tool, but I will probably go into more detail about it in the future.

Something interesting has emerged from this practice. I've noticed that it's common for me to have a day of light meals, light resting periods, and frequent activity periods followed by a day of large meals, slow movement, and lots of rest, in approximately a forty-eight-hour cycle. Like there's a day to be still, gather up energy, and plan my next moves, and there's a day to execute, back and forth. I have found ways to perturb this cycle if necessary without being too disruptive, but that usually involves carefully reshaping the waveform for a limited time, rather than disregarding it completely. I find myself wondering if other people's bodies follow similar rhythms. It's possible that I just incur harsher penalties for ignoring them.

However, there is a thought that keeps nagging at me. Suppose I do gain enough strength using this technique that I can think about stretching out beyond ... whatever the hell it is I'm doing now. The world around me does not operate according to rhythms like these. I'm not even sure how capable it is of arriving at some kind of harmony with them. I could spend all this time establishing these intricate patterns that allow me to kind of function, only to have them washed away in a rush of noise. Or maybe I could keep getting stronger, maybe even become capable of doing amazing things (Sure, why not dream big?) that hardly anyone benefits from, because the world and I are just too out of phase with each other. It's possible that everything I have to do to get back on my feet could only succeed in further isolating me.

This is where it starts to feel like fate is fucking with me. I often feel like I'm being presented with parodies of choice. Theoretically, I could do nothing, but I know exactly what would happen, and I refuse to allow it. Theoretically, I could turn away from these promising rhythms, except my world would be diminished so much by it, I really couldn't. So, I continue to explore them.

I've been very bad about following my "next post" statements in the past, but I feel like the stakes just went up. Sharing the contents of my mind is the one way I'm relatively confident I'll be able to consistently contribute to the world. Also, somewhere down the road, I hope to explain why I do things this way, instead of simply saying "I'm going to post every Friday," or something along those lines.

Currently reading about: Foxglove

Next blog post: Friday, 1 February, 2019