Healthy Writer

  • Healthy Writer

    Happy New Year 2020

    Ten years is ten years.  It’s the start of a new decade — because I said so. A decade is merely a group of 10 years, right? So, having not been around at that long-ago Year One, I am free to divide the time I spend on this earth any way I want! And I’ve decided that the new decade begins now. So here I am, ready to create a new me.  I have tools:  *a diet program *a subscription to the YMCA *books on Time Management (Atomic Habits by James Clear, Indistractable by Nir Eyal and Younger Next Year (for women) by Chris Crowley and Dr. Henry Lodge, MD).…

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    Coming Up for Air

    Seems like it’s been a while since I posted! Family duties caught and kept my attention during the summer — lots of milestones like the offspring’s high school graduation, followed by the final summer of childhood and the first tentative flight from the family nest to college. But now I’m settling into my own life again, and soon will report on new developments. In the meantime, enjoy the beautiful autumn skies, wherever you may be. 

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    Motivation

    You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.  — H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956) Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels So in my quest to defeat procrastination and find new motivation for moving toward my goals, I am reading Sam Horn’s Someday Is Not A Day In The Week; 10 Hacks to make the rest of your life the best of your life. I’ve already found a great tip: Have a pretend SEE to give you a sense of urgency. An SEE, he explains, is a “significant emotional event.” It’s something dramatic that forces us to reevaluate…

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    In Praise of Participation Trophies

    I love participation trophies. Don’t scoff. Knowing that people care, knowing that they see you – even if you’re not a star performer – well, that means a lot.   Learning something new is hard. When you first start to master any skill, you fumble and make mistakes. It’s an awkward process, and it takes encouragement to keep going. I’ve noticed that when we learn, we gravitate towards the skills that are easiest for us. Reading came easily to me, so I read a lot. All that practice made it even easier, and now I’m an avid reader for life. When I practiced Taekwondo, I noticed that some kids seemed…

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    Out of the Box

    When we are young, we believe that the future contains unlimited choices for us — who do you want to be when you grow up? You can be anything! Go for it. But as we enter the third chapter of our lives, many of us find that our field of choices have narrowed. We chose a career, a life path, and then after a couple of decades, we feel as if we’re stuck with it. Obligations and responsibilities have piled up, and eventually it seems impossible to change our direction. Now, instead of choices and control, our lives can seem to be made up of consequences. All those years spent…

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    The Re-Invented Self

    I’m writing this blog because I’m hoping to help myself as well as others. Together, I hope we can: Figure out who we want to be when we grow up. I’ve never thought my identity was set in stone. I always thought reinventing myself was fun, not frightening. As long as I can choose who I’m going to become, it’s all good, right? I am whoever I say I am. Right?? Well….just the other day, we took my son to his college orientation program. Everything was great until one of the student leaders thought I was my son’s grandmother, not his mother!  That was a blow. I’d talked myself into believing…

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    Cake and Grit

    So I’ve been on a low calorie diet for 2 months now, and I’m happy to say I’ve lost 15 pounds. I tried to take an updated photo, but the difference doesn’t really show. Maybe it’s just that I’ve still got a long way to go. And it hasn’t been easy, let me tell you. The moment I declared my intention to lose weight, my calendar began bursting with Memorial Day cookouts, graduation parties, and other occasions where people felt free to ask “Is that all you’re having?” Yes, those carrot sticks are all I’m having. No, I wouldn’t like a piece of cake. In the meantime, I’ve been reading…

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    First Steps to Financial Independence

    I come from a long tribe of grasshoppers. Do you know what I mean? I’m talking about the parable of the Grasshopper and the Ant. In the story, the grasshopper made music all summer and laughed at the industrious ant, who worked hard to store up grain for the winter. But when winter arrived, the grasshopper was in trouble while the ant was safe and well-fed. Here’s a full version of the fable. My family lived like grasshoppers. When we had money, we spent it. We borrowed or scraped together enough cash to enjoy ourselves today, because who knew what tomorrow would bring? It wasn’t as if we spent our…

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    Exercising when you’re creaky and disorganized

    Becoming an organized grownup is one of my big life goals, so I’ve gotten books from the library, subscribed to  a number of podcasts, and signed up with Credit Karma. What does that have to do with exercise? Because it has to do with energy. Younger people have more energy, as financial advice author David Bach (author of The Latte Factor) stated in a podcast interview with Paula Pant on her Afford Anything show. I agree with this. I think we all have more energy in our 30s than in our 40s, more energy in our 40s than our 50s, and so on. And that dictates the level of activity…

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    Healthy Writer – The Original Post

    This is me. I’m still astonished to find that I’m now 60 years old. How did that happen? Along with the mystery of how I got this old, I’ve got other conundrums to contemplate, like: How come I gained all this weight? When did my health take a nose-dive? And, last but not least, what can I do about it? The answers to the first two questions are pretty simple: 1) I’m a writer, and spend most of my day sitting in front of my laptop surfing the Net doing Important Writing Tasks, and 2) I stopped exercising regularly and eating healthy. That third question’s the kicker: What can I…