inertia

My good Serbian woman states what we in Australia know as the bleeding obvious: the less exercise you do, the harder it is to find the motivation to do any at all. All aspects of fitness—cardiovascular, muscle tone and muscle mass, and general energy level—fall away.

I’m suffering a debilitating physical inertia. I can count on the digits of one hand the days this month I’ve been on the bike or to the gym. Going to gym classes motivates me. An instructor leads, there’s music and other people to keep in sync with. Left to my own devices I sit and look at the equipment.

The gym is out of the equation when work takes me to Newcastle, Sydney and Darwin. Some hotels have gyms but I have no will to enter on my own and put myself through … well, what exactly?

My general health feeds into my inertia. I start the month with a cold, feel shit. My dodgy back has me leaning on the bedpost to gingerly lift and manoeuvre a leg into my shorts lest my back ping into spasm, so picking up weights in a pump class seems absurd.

I ride on Sundays but not in the last fortnight, not even to the local shops. The weather gets cold and dark and slinging a leg over the bike needs light and time. Nick at the bike shop says riding twice a week is a minimum to maintain current fitness; anything less and you’re pedalling backwards.

So it feels good to find the time to exercise on three consecutive days. On Sunday morning Rock and I chug up the north end of the Tourist Road to Olinda. On Monday morning I ride to the gym, ears zinging in the chill, and join what was my regular pump class, depleted by those who’ve dropped off as autumn deepens.

This afternoon I make my slowest ever ascent of the Mountain Highway. I feel so crap. Not one other cyclist is out on this sunny Tuesday afternoon.  My body is a lead balloon with jellied sausages for legs. It’s inertia, physical, mental, metaphorical and literal.

I haven’t ridden to our Collingwood office yet, but plan to ride once a week when the interstate travel drops off. In the Tokyo Bike Shop around the corner from the MM office in Peel Street live some spiffy single-speed machines for $800. Around another corner is Smith Street Cycles and their range of Charge singles. New bikes get bums on seats.

Aspiration is the natural enemy of inertia. Rock on. 

heritability

Apparently Australian women are only half as likely as their American counterparts to administer what they know to be a lethal jolt of electricity to a stranger when ordered to do so. Our sheilas have a spirit of independence, defiance and mistrust of authority. Thank god for Australian culture.

This factoid from an article in today’s big paper corroborates an argument as to why nurture, and in this case culture, is as or more important than nature, as decreed by our genetic make-up.

Nurture held sway in 1975 in the Nature versus Nurture debate. Studying a bit of pop psychology in my final year at teachers’ college, I want to believe that the children whose lives I am about to enter are blank slates ready for me to do a bit of colouring-in.

Nature wrestled its way on top when the human genome was decoded and we were absolved of our faults—heritability determined our likelihood of being a bogan, getting a divorce, voting Liberal or psychopathy. But Nurture lives to fight another day.

As I obsessively self-analyse (during this bout of ‘transition’), I wonder what sort of Muslim, or Eskimo, or Chinese I would be. What sort of person or man might I be had I not finished school and been a teacher, had I not played sport, or gone overseas at 17 instead of 55? They’re the imponderables I ponder from time to time.

Would I be an atheist in a Muslim country given my lack of the religiosity gene? Would I harpoon myself if I were an Eskimo rather than endure the sterile whiteness of my snowy surrounds another minute? (I missed the love-of-snow gene too.) Would I be perversely dissident in the herd of one point three billion corporate Chinamen?

My organic latter-day hippie but grounded and eminently sensible daughter is, of course, paying homage to nurture in busting a gut in a relaxed way to give my grand-daughter, young Miss Nerrington, a stimulating and nourishing environment in which to begin life, while I wait for those inherited characteristics I can now observe over four family generations to emerge.

My daughter is right, just as I was with her and her brother, to do whatever she can to raise an intelligent, independent and well-balanced child without obsessing about perfection, either from Nerri or from herself as a mother.

I can’t help but think that the Nature versus Nurture debate is a spurious one. Most of us are inexplicable messes of genes and upbringing and culture. Sometimes one rules over the other. Some genes are stronger than others, some environments all-pervading.

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” Is Philip Larkin talking genes or child-rearing? Surely he’s talking about both.

Rock on.   

growth

Growing in large pots along the back fence are cucumbers, chillies, watermelon, climbing beans and tomatoes. The cucumbers are producing, rats have eaten the tomato stems, the watermelons want more heat and the beans are doing nothing. The chillies are taking off since I moved them from a less sunny spot.

Above them on a trellis is a pandorea jasminoides in full pink and red-throated flower and against the house is a metal compost tumbler half-full of rich black decomposition. A rampant lemon tree fills the corner near the tiny deck by the back door.

Under the lemon are broccoli, leeks and zucchini, and two baskets of basil dangle from the branches. And against the deck battens are pots of garlic and plain chives, basil, and marjoram. The oregano, lemon grass, thyme and rosemary are planted in the garden around the corner.

Two vegie boxes house green mignonette lettuces, French beans, self-seeded cherry tomatoes, beetroot, carrots and some capsicums struggling back to life after ravaging by rats or possums. The coriander didn’t make it.

Two lime trees—the Kaffir is rollicking along—line the side fence, along with a grafted apple tree. The other apple tree is espaliered on the back fence but mostly billowing high above it. In my new vegie bed are more capsicums and broccoli, cos lettuces and onions. Basil and parsley grown from seed occupy a sunny nook near the carport.

Off the back of the carport is a new garden with small flowering natives—brachyscomes, paper daisies, a running postman (kennedia prostrata) and others whose names escape me. Another lime is in the middle of the plot and a blood-red bougainvillea and a deep pink mandevilla are twining their ways up netting tacked on the back of the carport.

In a sop to my affection for the flowering windowsills of France I have gaudy petunias cascading down the back steps and hanging in baskets on the side of the carport. A few more are planted out around the garden. The midnight violet and the smoky-blue with networks of purple veins are my favourites.

One large central space remains to be converted from turf to vegetable patch. More brick paths need laying. The sandy hydrophobic soil needs bags and bags of manure and compost. And all of it needs the daily attention I happily give it—pulling a few weeds here, pruning off dead bits, sweeping, watering and refurbishing the pots after their produce is spent.

     

Rock on.   

transition

My good woman says I’m in transition. She tells me it’s a difficult time for the problem gamblers she counsels, the time they are most likely to lose control, if they have any. Apparently I’m having a very late mid-life crisis, whereas I think of myself as in a state of perpetual misgiving.

Transition suggests movement from somewhere to somewhere else; from one job to another, or to not having a job. It could also be moving from one stage of life to another. These are matters for judgment. My own is that I’m not actually going anywhere, hence a vague but pervading feeling of discontent.

My good woman has a point. I was gainfully if not lucratively employed until 31 December. I earned a meagre salary, but it is packaged to advantage, my mortgage is fortnightly and descending rapidly. Going to work three days a week gives a modicum of structure to a mostly unroutine life. No structure props any part of it up right now.

I run an OCD house—everything has its place, but nothing runs to a timetable. I’m punctual to a fault for appointments, but if a time isn’t set for something to happen, then it could happen any time or just not happen at all. I don’t do any of my three favourite things at a set time. I don’t write every night or first thing every morning. I don’t ride regularly. I read at the strangest times.

My bank accounts move from Cr to Dr, my back gives me gip, my weight heads in the wrong direction, headaches are more frequent, and my gym attendance diminishes.

Perhaps transition just means out of kilter. We are full of contradictions. It makes us human.

Rock on.   

days like these

Last night I facilitate a special owners corporation meeting in my lounge room. We have no manager, bank account, or unanimity about how to proceed. Dan and Jim have almost come to blows in the driveway about other issues, and Joyce can get pretty feisty. Fio wants to pay no management fees, his English is nil, and Alvena defers to her incomprehensible husband.

I run a calm meeting, reframe Jim’s “dispute” into a discussion, and we achieve a nice outcome that moves us all to better understandings of the issues and each other. I go to bed relieved and sleep peacefully under a purple sarong after a hot and muggy day.

I rise this morning to some relief of the pain above my left buttock that’s increased over three days. I can’t lie, sit, stand, or walk without great discomfort. Yesterday’s residual warmth radiates from the walls. The Bureau promises a hotter day with even higher humidity.

The morning is a blast: things unfold nicely. Before breakfast I fire up the interweb and launch an email into cyberspace: is the mentor training I’m running tonight in Castlemaine still on? At nine I meet with my co-presenter for an upcoming two-day workshop in Sydney. I’m excited to be reprising last year’s well-received gig. I write the sexuality educator job application with a brilliant first-time cover letter and proof of my godliness packed into a one-page narrative addressing the selection criteria. Mike emails that tonight’s Castlemaine gig is off. I top it off with a lunch of mushroom risotto my good woman made the other night.

Later I wake from an after-lunch siesta in a muck sweat on the couch, my head leaden. Sid the cat lies stupefied on the floor; the JRT hangs limply out of his box-bed. The airless house slumps on its haunches.

The phone rings. Bullyboy Jim tells me he’s spoken to “his man”, and his man, a property manager, reckons I should pay higher fees than the other units because my lot area is greater. The last air in my day seeps out of me.

I raise every blind and open every window to get some oxygen into the house. Gloom descends instead and a fierce electrical storm bursts. Thunder rattles the panes, water cascades over the gutters and mocks the temporary drain protecting my front door.

I decide to turn the computer off but it dies as I reach for the switch. My back aches.

Later I drive to my good woman’s place. I feel depressed and in need of psychotherapy. She tells me everyone at her workplace began the day wrung out and it just got worse. It’s the weather, she says.

“It’s life,” I reply. “It’s Jim, it’s not having a meaningful job, it’s being sixty, it’s constant pain in my back.” She likes it when I whinge, and tells me so. We laugh.

Rock on.