Eating half-plates is making a dent in lots of things.
Including my focus.
Since Wednesday, I’ve taken in — and been given — a lot of information, and have a lot of suggested actions. Even at the outset, I tried to pare this down; I know the research about keeping new behaviors in place. (Which, if you don’t, can be summarized thus: only one or two new thing at a time.) Even still, I’ve a stack of behaviors:
- Half-plates, no snacks, no sweets, no wine on weekdays. (Is that four?)
- Leg exercises, so I can eventually walk/run faster than the 3 1/2 miles an hour I reach just before I get shin splints. Because even with my 2-3x/week exercise, my heart fitness is only fair. If I can’t move faster, my heart can’t work harder.
- Bedtime by 9:30pm, so my brain can wind down and put me to sleep by 10 or 10:30pm.
- Weighing myself before bed.
And then there’s the behaviors I only recently added, like blogging.
Adding the new elements has me revisiting the prior (they’re not old yet) elements, so now the whole apple-cart is wobbling. I feel as if I’m thinking about each and every thing. I don’t want to think about all these things; they’re not interesting. I want to use my brain for other purposes, like wrestling with art. And faith.
But even if my brain wasn’t full of all these concrete bits, I suspect I couldn’t sustain any thought-wrestling. The hunger murmurs in the background like a circulation pump, pulling focus. No, not pulling focus, stirring up the channels of my mind so that every thought is pushed around.
I have it on good authority that, at some point Not Soon, the hunger will pass. Here’s hoping that fluid thought returns even sooner than that.