Enthusiasm, cookies, minimums, and the dark side

Every gift we have has a darker side, as we all know.  Cookies:  delicious, but so many calories!  Speed, but then we feel impatient.  Cars, but then we don’t walk as much and we get mad at traffic.  All fine examples, but the one that is plaguing me today is enthusiasm.  Maybe I am not alone.

 

I get excited about stuff.  Spin is great!  Weight lifting is great!  I love yoga!  Oooh!  Shiny Pilates!  Oh, yeah, and I want to ride my bike and ski and rent a kayak and and and.  I run around trying to Do All The Things and suddenly I am very very tired.

 

I could just become enthusiastic about naps, which is not a terrible idea; I, like nearly all of us, could use more sleep on a regular basis.  However, there is another way to cope:  the minimum.

 

I’ve talked about this a lot from various perspectives, but today the minimum protects us from the excesses of our enthusiasm.  We have those times when we’re convinced that we should do that AND that AND that AND that other thing over there, too, until we are exhausted, overwhelmed, and inclined to feel inadequate for not finishing everything.  The minimum is the basic amount we need to do to be healthy and sane.  It is a widely applicable system, but I’ll confine my examples to fitness since that’s the scope of my practice.

 

We all need to find our own minimums.  The general guidelines for health suggest that we need about 30 minutes of moderate cardio exercise about five days a week.  If we have not been moving at all, that might be way too high for a first minimum and we might want to choose something like walking to the mailbox or around the block.  Those of us who have been working out regularly may find that we need that cardio every day and that there are some stretches that really make life a lot better when we do them daily.  Others of us may not need to set a cardio minimum, but we know we need to lift weights on Mondays and Fridays to feel like ourselves.  The key is to make it something we can achieve even when we’re having a terrible day.  Maybe everything possible went wrong, but darn it, we did five whole minutes of yoga; if we can manage that, we can cope with whatever else comes up.

 

Go do just a little.  It’s enough.  And we are enough, too.