Sunday, June 18, 2000

1:43 a.m. Well, I've come to a decision about this web column, and not a minute too soon. In just a few days, I will have reached the one-year mark, with not a single missed day ... a great and glorious goal, and I am very proud of my effort. It's been a daily effort, and some days it's been a great effort.

I've been fussing and fretting about whether or not to continue with such a grueling schedule now that I've obviously made my point to myself that I could write every day if I tried really really hard. Plus, I've got some traveling maybe shaping up, making it even harder and harder to get in front of a machine to write.

So you would think that this would be a perfect time to bow out gracefully and hold the year close to my heart and let the next year take me where it may. You would think I'd be thrilled to stop running in place here and exhausting myself most nights as I type and long for the bed ...

... but no. I've gained something that I'm not ready to give up. I know my own slip-away personality, and I know that if I didn't create a rigid schedule ... well, I know that I would very smoothly slip away. I'd skip tonight, for instance, because I'm pretty darn tired. We've been out all day again and so my report from the field is not that much different from yesterday.

(Udon instead of ravioli, plants instead of wine glasses, and I wore my shirt inside out all day by mistake. Igor assumed it was a fashion statement and said nothing; our car was trapped in a parking lot that had closed -- just like the sign said it would -- minutes before we got back from dinner.)

So -- nothing very world-shaking and no deep thoughts beyond watching some girls and boys rollerblading and thinking about how much fun it might be to try it one day. The girl I was watching had matchstick-thin limbs and she wore cut-off jeans and no padding of any kind, and she stopped and waiting for the light to change and circled around and kissed her boyfriend as if she were wearing earth-gripping sneakers instead of slippery ball bearings on her feet.

Excess muscles weren't needed -- just exquisite confidence and the skill that comes from a whole lot of practice. It's only hard if you've never done it. It gets easier if you do it all the time. Soon, it's second nature ... and that's when you can start getting fancy and opening your heart and communing with your own unique destiny.

Just another set of skills, born from a relentless repetition.

No need to draw any parallels here -- it's more than obvious. My decision has been made -- I'm going to keep on going, keep on trying to never miss a day. If it means coming up with a machine for the road set up with Blogger and a notify list, so be it. I don't want to lose my ability to spin and swoop and dart in and out of the daily traffic of each day, and if I stop or slow up, I will look back on this past year and wonder how I ever managed to achieve it.

It will be a rueful memory instead of an active skill. I've got enough of those memories and too few of those skills ... and I've been thinking ...

... what if I exercised every day?