Lately I've been thinking about laziness. This is partly, but not entirely, because I am a very lazy person. If I were lazier I probably wouldn't think about my laziness at all, but unfortunately, I've managed to summon precisely enough will to get close to goals that my laziness then prevents me from truly accomplishing.

I did finish a novel this year. That was very satisfying. But I've also managed to go to the gym (my basement) consistently enough that I have a nice little streak on my tracking app, yet not consistently enough to see the #gainz I was really hoping for. Disappointing! Yet inevitable, many would say. We all know the stats on how often gyms are actually used.

In the past year or so I did have something of a breakthrough. Summer was miserable for me; I think it was miserable for everyone I know. For me personally, a lot of problems coalesced into one big problem and occasionally I did work out about it. I switched up my exercise more than I did last year. Last year I mostly just grimly biked and did bodyweight exercises to keep my muscles from completely atrophying. (We didn't get dumbbells till November, because of supply chain issues and also because I was unwilling to pay $5/lb for them.)

Biking is kind of fraught for me as "exercise" because I have a nervous disposition and it is a part-time sport in Minnesota. Yes, you can bike in the winter - and I have, actually; I was once followed by a very angry driver all the way up the hill by the cathedral in St Paul. But it's not really a "workout", or at least, the thing you're working out is your will to live rather than your quads. I am a slow cyclist at the best of times, and winter is the worst of times. Last summer, I knew that this form of exercise wasn't sustainable, and I dreaded the weather changing because that would mean an inevitable shake-up in my routine, and also probably my whole body turning to mush and washing away in a storm drain.

The latter didn't happen, but I did give up cycling and just kind of fuck around for a month until my dumbbells and pull-up station finally arrived. Then I started using them, then I stopped, then I started again - and then I kept going, and I haven't been the same since.

Not because I got jacked or anything. I am still too lazy for that. But I started to understand my own relationship with exercise routines a little better; specifically, I realized that I invested so much energy in keeping up a streak, in just doing it, that I was neglecting practice of a very basic skill. I had never really learned how to take breaks - how to stop, start, and stop again, without making it all a big drama of culturally Calvinist self-flagellation.

You see absolutism around physical activity in a lot of exercise publications and diet-focused shit for obvious reasons, but it pops up in surprising places too. My favorite is when we debate putting more bike lanes in: but you can only bike half the year in Minnesota! detractors scream. It's realistically more like 8 months of the year, sometimes stretching to 10, because we are, after all, in a climate crisis. It's just not that cold anymore.

But also, so what? 10 months of the year, or even 8 months of the year, is still quite a lot. Half the year is a lot! If you cut emissions from cars by 50%, that would be a huge accomplishment. Similarly, if you "only" work out consistently half the year, well, who can say they're doing even that much? A minority of America, if literally every survey over the last 20+ years is to be believed.

I'm making an incrementalist argument. There's nothing substantively new here. But I do think it's important to focus in on exercise, something we have such a complex about. The hardest part of working out for me is establishing and then sticking to a routine, and the pandemic forced me to internalize that a large part of my problem was that I had no fucking practice in picking up a routine. An abandoned piece of knitting lies abandoned forever; a half-finished story languishes in my "writing misc" folder. And gym equipment gets dusty because I let a 2-week break turn into a 2-year break. The world spins madly on, etc.

Moving from biking to weights last year was an inadvertent fix to this problem for me. The seasonal pattern of exercise becomes its own start-stop-start mechanism, a keeper of time so all-encompassing that it was simple to pattern my life after it. I don't think the seasonal aspect is really the most important part, though. What mattered - what was life-changing, because I am actually healthier now - was learning to start something up again. To take substantial time away, to return, to have goals that matter enough to make the return meaningful.

The reality is that exercise isn't sustainable if I have to do it 3x/week every week or else take 2-3 years off. I am prone to sinus infections and the rona vaccine laid me out for 5 days: occasionally I am going to miss a week or three. But being able to pick up where I left off, to fall back into a groove, is in fact a learned skill. And, fingers crossed, I may have finally learned it.