My friend Sarah Carter discusses living room values in her book All About Change. She offers a simple question, "What does your living room look like when you are eighty?" I think about this question. It helps align my actions with my values of experience and achievement. I think about what I want on my walls, my bookshelves, and desk (I think about a lot of spaces in my house, not just my living room).
The past year, I have lived in house with nothing on the walls. Last year we moved to our current house because my husband received a cancer diagnosis while stationed in Okinawa, Japan. The healthcare system in Japan cannot support cancer diagnosis and treatment, so we left our home and spent nearly four months in hotels Hawaii (not in luxurious way) until we were semi-permanently relocated.
We are now nearing the end of this stage of our journey and are about to head across the country. We will rent an apartment for six months while we figure out where we want to live and purchase home, bringing me back to Sarah's question, what do I want my spaces to look like not just when I am eighty, but right now?
I am fortunate to have collected memorabilia from a multitude of experiences over my life. I have books, photos, prints, posters, Funko Pops, and more. I also have medals and race bibs from times when I was interested in running road races and later trail races. I was actively engaged in trail trotting until Covid-19 restrictions were implemented in 2020. 2020 is also when we moved to Okinawa, and the climate and sedentary standard I had settled into combined with work, school, and volunteer commitments, negatively impacted my activity.
As we start toward a new life season, I find myself longing to add to pictures on the wall from nature and wanting to experience nature by wandering the woods or coast or mountains. I know that means I need to address some of the bad habits I have allowed to creep in by leveraging legitimate and illegitimate excuses ranging from caregiving to academic due dates to not wanting to leave the dog alone. If I want to live the life I want, I need to take better care of my physical, mental, and emotional selves.
So, here is where this aspect of this adventure is going to start. I have already taken the baby step of walking the dog (almost) every day. The dog walking become a more frequent necessity since we will be living in an apartment.
Next steps upon arrival will be setting up doctors appointments and figuring out a workout plan. I don't care for gyms or working out with or in front of people. However, I am not really in a place to jump right into running, which I think has appealed to me because it can be quite solitary. We will be near to some trails, so I am hoping to carve out space to spend time on those.
I hope to find a mindful practice, maybe writing, maybe a very specific type of yoga, or maybe something I haven't though of yet.
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