I missed a few days, so I'm catching up in one fell swoop, on a Sunday, while I'm at Prato having some screwdrivers and brunch and watching the Bills play the Patriots, a game that started with a 96-yard TD on opening kickoff, with Damar Hamlin watching from his hospital bed just six days after he collapsed on the field.

His reaction:

With that motivation in mind, let's get to Days 4-7 of the Stoics challenge going, pretty much all of which I'm already doing—yay me!

Day 4: Find someone to teach.

I know using my own kids is kind of a copout, but man, this has been a tough couple of years, and I need to fully concentrate on my daughter to help her get through junior year. She is my sole dedicated mentee.

Day 5: Get your desk in order.

I "decluttered" my phone, computer files, and to-do list right before the new year, as I like to do every year, so I'm on track with this. I need to also work on my "office" (i.e., bedroom), and other rooms in the house as well, but I'll take this as a W.

Day 6: Carve out some leisure time apart from your phone.

This is all about slashing social media use (which I've been doing anyway—no hate-reading Long Island fascists on the weekend, and limiting my use of it to mainly two times a day, not all day long), and I have my creative goals for the year, so I'm good here, too. 

Day 7: Take a self-care day.

I've been doing Jennsday Wednesdays since before the pandemic. I rule.

Tweets and treats at @jenngidman.

Today's Daily Stoic challenge: finding a mentor, teacher, or other ways to up my learning in some subject. Seeking out my own personal Plato, as it were. I'd like to take more photography classes, but I'm not sure yet if I'll have the time over the next few months for an in-person thing. In the meantime, I have access to a MasterClass roster, so I'll do the series on mindfulness, ukulele playing (it's been awhile), or one of the cooking tutorials. We'll see how things pan out.

In other news related to yesterday's post, about getting better sleep: I don't want to demonize naps, or eliminate them completely from my life, because they can be nourishing and good, but I have to get a better handle on how I integrate them. Went out for a Jennsday Wednesday lunch, came back and crashed (still feeling a little under the weather) from 6pm till about 10pm. Now it's almost midnight, I'm wide awake, and tomorrow I'll probably be in a bad sleep cycle again. The difference this time is I'll commit to resetting for next week... or even for Friday! Every day is a new day.

Tweets and treats at @jenngidman.

  

Today's Daily Stoic challenge: quiet quitting. A little different from the trend of quiet quitting, in which you do the bare minimum at work—just enough to stay afloat and not get canned.

This concept is more like cutting out some toxic shit in your life, without having to tell the whole world about it (I know I'm blogging about this, but no one KNOWS I'm blogging about it, at least not in this moment). As today's instructive email details: It's time to decide to get rid of a bad habit, a negative thought pattern, a toxic relationship, something that is poisoning your life.

I've already done that in various ways over the past few months. Finally distanced myself from someone I thought was a friend but who ghosted me the second they no longer needed me as an emotional bridge loan. I'd kept the door open a crack for far too long, hoping maybe there'd be a conversation, an explanation, a desire to reconnect—but sometimes you have to create your own closure, and now I have. Started cutting down on social media intake, in both breadth, frequency, and content (i.e., I'm trying not to soil my weekends and vacations by hate-reading tweets and FB posts of local fascists; that's a workweek activity only now).

But I guess today's exercise is something I'm supposed to do starting today. It's tough, because when I think of my vices, I really, really, really am resistant to letting go, when it comes right down to it. I've apparently got a lot of crutches. At any rate, after thinking for a few minutes, I've decided to excise staying up past midnight on "school nights" (i.e., when I have to work the next day). My sleep habits are horrible, and part of it is that late at night is really my only downtime. But I've got to get some sleep, man—so lights out, phone off, and Calm App activated by 12:00am every night. I'll try for that most of the time, anyway.

Tweets and treats at @jenngidman.

 

I still felt like crap today, so taking it easy on the physical end of things. I also ate three tacos for Taco Monday instead of the two I should have. But for Day 1 of the Stoics challenge (really Day 2, if you count yesterday's cold-shower warmup), the task was to come up with a mantra. Something short and inspiring that you say to yourself every day, multiple times a day, to keep you going when things get tough.

I already kind of do this in various ways. I've been known to say (to both myself and my kids) on some of the worst days: "Tomorrow is a new day." Sometimes it's the only thing that gets me through when the day has been rough, or if I didn't do what I thought I'd do, which is torture for my perfectionist soul. Telling myself I get a do-over on the morrow is soothing.

I also like "amor fati," or "love of one's fate," which is kind of the Daily Stoics mantra. I would even consider getting that as a tattoo. But for this challenge it seems like a cheat. 

So two other top contenders that I like: "Keep fucking going" (I used to have a ring that said this, before I lost it) and "This is the way" (from The Mandalorian). I don't know why I especially like the second one. Maybe because I really liked The Mandalorian, and because it seems saying "this is the way" might offer me encouragement to keep going that way, even if it seems like a tough way, because "this is the way." That's the way I have to go if I want to get to where I want to go. Simple but powerful.

Fuck it, I'm doing both. And just got the hat and ring to match.

Tweets and treats at @jenngidman.

New Year, New Me (Maybe?)

He doesn't usually look this stern.

Looking at the dates on previous posts, I haven't used this blog for nearly four years. But I'm starting 2023 determined to (finally) make some long-desired changes, and an accountability journal of sorts seems to be in order. This won't be great writing or anything, just nonwitty, tired scribblings of my thoughts at the end of each day as I muddle through this.

The past four years have been a shitstorm—marriage upheaval, pandemic, deaths of people I love, child turmoil—and I've managed to tread shit in the process and stay afloat, and we're all generally OK (at the moment), but swimming in shitstorms can take a toll, and it has on me, in myriad ways.

So without belaboring things, I hope to make this the year that I get 'er done—physically, mentally, and creatively. A introduced me to the Daily Stoics, helmed by Ryan Holiday, which taps into the philosophies and life hacks of folks like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and others who try to get you to accept that suffering will happen in life, but it's up to you how you get through that. I know that probably sounds like a whole lot of self-help BS that shady people like Anthony Robbins push, but I like the Daily Stoics stuff because it's generally practical advice to get you through the day-to-day and just strive to be a generally better person. 

And so toward that end, I signed up for the Daily Stoics 2023 "New Year, New You" 23-day challenge, which notes that most people start out the new year with the best of intentions, but then crap out a few weeks in. By pointing this fact out, however, they hope to alert participants to keep pushing through when it's uncomfortable. None of this is going to be easy. When that self-awareness is at top of mind, it becomes easier to hold yourself accountable. You know it's gonna suck, but you do it anyway. That's the hope, at least.

Today's "warm-up" challenge: Take an icy water plunge, either in the ocean or a lake, or at least in an ice-cold shower for 23 seconds—the same number of days in this challenge. I could've driven up to Robert Moses to take a dip, but I'm sick and didn't want to go overboard, so I just did the cold shower, after a walk around the neighborhood on a very mild January day. There was lots of cursing (in the shower; not on the walk).

Tweets and treats at @jenngidman.