Everyone who knows me knows every morning I make my bed, cross the room, and turn off the alarm before it turns off, meaning within sixty seconds. I have other sidchas, like picking up litter daily, which I’ve done without fail since 2017. People ask why, which seems obvious. Doing something with a measure of quality and a time limit gives a sense of purpose. For a cash cost of[…] Keep reading →

I exercise on a five-day rotation between lifting, resting, and cardio so months with 31 days give me an extra rest day to experiment. This time I decided to try to recapture my nearly five-year-old achievement of 5,000 meters in 20 minutes on the rowing machine, which means averaging 2:00/500m for 20 minutes. A well-trained man in his 20s or 30s could do it easily. A serious competitor might not[…] Keep reading →

This headline, Goodwill Doesn’t Want Your Broken Toaster, reminding me of my recent post that lines to dump worthless junk on Goodwill are often longer than the lines to buy it prompted me to post an idea I’ve had for a long time but for some reason haven’t posted. Pollution on the Earth is obesity on our bodies, manifesting our values and behaviors in different places. This: is this: The[…] Keep reading →

Over the weekend I went to Washington Square Park to read, so I was there for a couple hours. It was a beautiful, sunny day. Bright and just hot enough that you’d want to avoid the sun but not so hot that you couldn’t stand it. A guy sat on a bench diagonally across from me with a cup of ice cream from a nearby store. Besides him, I would[…] Keep reading →

Before I had an outline and composition that worked for this book, I wrote a lot, but kept having to restart. I was spinning my wheels. Then I started working with a coach. She didn’t know anything about sustainability or stewardship, but she knew about writing. I could separate my two broad challenges—structure and content. By structure I mean the craft of writing, which included composition, time writing, focusing on[…] Keep reading →

1. My heaviest kettlebell is 28 kilograms or 63 pounds. Now, exercises I couldn’t do at that weight I can do several sets of. It feels great to be able to do something easily that I used to be unable to do. I thought about getting a 32 kilogram (70 pound) on. Now I’ve decided to get one. Nothing special about moving up a weight. What feels rewarding is that[…] Keep reading →

I remember the first time I saw an old person doing burpees. Her body didn’t have the flexibility or strength to do them how a younger person could. When I started mine, around 40 years old, I knew I couldn’t do them like guy in his thirties or twenties. I didn’t think about how they’d feel later. Over the years, as I’ve grown stronger and with experience, I’ve added to[…] Keep reading →