Saturday, 19 March 2022
Spring continues to advance, though I think there is much merit in changing the season’s name to “slush.” Regardless, the trees’ branches are losing their definition as buds swell, though their structure – punctuated with the occasional ruins of squirrel nests –is still legible. There are large patches of bare ground in the yard, and every day the snow retreats a bit more, emphasizing the areas of ground that are more shaded, or that through natural or human means have received more than their share of snow.
The advance of spring is nicely timed, the increasing light and temperatures encouraging me to increase my physical activity. I have now passed the point where, on the earlier side, I was not allowed to lift anything more than 10 pounds, and now, on the other side, am allowed to lift anything. I had hoped there would be a moment where I would feel a surge rush through my body, muscles swelling, sinews knitting, chest expanding and would burst forth from convalescence like Athena out of Zeus’ forehead. Unfortunately, I was apparently thinking about something, and missed it. Nevertheless, I am now out and about, walking 4 to 5 miles without discomfort, pausing only to promiscuously lift items that weigh more than 10 pounds.
The return to physical therapy has proved a boon to my strength and stretching regimen. I had a regimen going pretty regularly, at least as I recall, until last fall, when the diagnosis of prostate cancer apparently caused me to abandon it. I say ‘apparently’ because I simply do not recall making any decision about it; at some point, I recognized that I was no longer doing it, but had and have no awareness of when or why I stopped, but ‘distraction by diagnosis’ seems a likely enough cause. Now that I have passed the magic point where I may do anything, I want to get back to that regime. So, along with the exercises I’ve been assigned to do for my elbow difficulty (see the entry on my love of physical therapy), I am adding back in some of my prior exercises.
I do find that having a physical way of tracking what I’ve done adds to my motivation. In the past I’ve printed out forms that I fill in, but for this round I’m using a spreadsheet. One thing that’s nice about that is that I’ve set it up so that when I have done part of the complement of one of my exercises for the day, the background color changes, and when I have done them all it changes again to a nice green. If I do every exercise I’m supposed to, I get a satisfying all-green column. It’s stupid, but it works for me.
This ‘stupid trick’ reminds me of gestalt psychology, and particularly the notion – which may or may not be officially part of gestalt psychology – that humans have a preference for holistic looking figures and tend to ‘complete’ partial figures so that they are experienced as whole figures. For instance:
I will not pursue it now, but a little searching brought me to a nice modern-day review of gestalt psychology, and attempt to put it in the context of current cognitive science. It is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3482144/.