Re-entering orbit

Back into rhythm and mixing my metaphors

New Year, Same Me.

• 🎥 Happiness For Beginners. I told you back in November that I’d read - and loved - this book on audio, and I have now finally seen the film. I loved it. And I was looking up group hiking trips before I got to the end…

• 📕 Tommy Cabot Was Here by Cat Sebastian. Putting Cat Sebastian’s We Should Be So Good on my top-10 list of books for 2023 reminded me that I had wanted to start her Cabots series. So I read this novella, and it was wonderful. Comfort, and second chances, and caring, and found family. I highly recommend it! (Amazon - ad, affiliate link)

• ☕️ Hot Chocolate. It’s been cold and dreary outside this week. This is simple and it is good. And that’s what I like.

I saw a Note on Substack earlier this week (it’s the ‘news feed’ bit of Substack where you can reshare other people’s newsletters, as if you were reblogging on Tumblr or retweeting on the app formerly known as Twitter), sharing Esther at The Spike’s post about ‘New Year’.

New Year?

It crystallised something I’d had in the back of my mind already. While I’ve been in the anti-diet-culture and healthy-goals parts of the internet for a while now, I’ve always found that hard to reconcile with the fact that, after a month of celebrations and feasting, and hibernating and napping, I just want to get back into my regular routines.

Work-wise, I’ve been lucky enough to have a few days of ‘re-entry’, where I’ve been working from my kitchen table, and using my breaks to make a dent in the post-holiday laundry mountain. Even better, though, I’ve been back in the gym.

Until the lockdowns hit in March of 2020, I never realised how important my workout routine was to feeling good in my brain and soul. I bounce around the upper end of the ‘standard’ dress size spectrum, so I’ve always felt uneasy claiming a ‘sporty’ identity - and exercise hasn’t always been a part of my life in the way it’s become during my twenties. But there I was, in the gym 5ish times a week, getting my heart rate up on the treadmill, pulsing through barre classes, or zigzagging through Zumba classes, and doing two hour runs at the weekend training for a half marathon (which I didn’t get to do), right up until the world closed.

It was 18 months before I felt safe going back into the gym, and by the end of another half-marathon training cycle in 2022, where I was prevented from actually running the race thanks to Covid, it’s fair to say I’d fallen out of love with running. 2023 was the year of finding myself back in the dance studio - and loving every second.

Joining dance classes in my new city has been a great way to feel embedded here, and I can’t wait to get back into class tomorrow! (Here’s hoping I can find my tap shoes…)

Back to Esther’s original point though - getting into the gym three days running this week, and raring myself up for dance starting tomorrow, isn’t any sort of new year’s resolution. It’s just getting back to my normal. In statistics, it would be called regression to the mean, but that sounds pretty negative… so I’ll call it snapping back into rhythm instead.

Speak soon,

Lily

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