By Valerie Peralta
April marked one year in my position as the coordinator of a college writing center. In the past 12 months I’ve become adept at using Microsoft Teams, developed an attitude of tolerance toward AI as a tool, and gained the trust of my team of tutors as well as several students and English composition professors. On the other hand, my pant size has increased thanks to sitting almost nine hours a day between my commute and workday. And I haven’t written much besides emails, meeting agendas, and workshops on writing. While my creativity remains an ember inside me, when a writing deadline looms my anxiety roars like the bonfires I used to toast marshmallows in as a teenager. The only way to quench that feeling is to write.
I struggle to drag myself out of bed to get to work on time, so joining a 5 a.m. workout or writing club is not on my horizon. Instead, I sneak my two pastimes in throughout the day. In the mornings, I pass rows of empty parking spots until I get to the third floor of the garage. This way I climb up and down six flights of stairs each day.
At the beginning of the year, my son challenged me to write four poems a day. I don’t think he knew what he was asking, but I gave it a try – scribbling lines that at least hoped to be poetry into a little notebook. The practice lasted only a few days because I left it for the time between getting in bed and turning out the light each night. Now I respond to the prompt “I’ll share the joy of noticing small miracles around me,” recording experiences that catch my attention each day. Experiences like noticing salmon-colored tree blossoms and feeling the warmth of sunshine on my skin as I walked to my car after work on a January afternoon in South Florida. At the end of the year maybe some of the memories will inform a memoir in verse or some prose pieces. Or maybe they will just have been an exercise in tending to words, a development of discipline – like the year I logged 365 miles to build the habit of walking at least seven fitness miles a week.
Sometimes discipline isn’t enough, though. I have been closing my fitness rings regularly and traded the ice cream habit I developed during the pandemic for a square of dark chocolate each day, and yet, my cholesterol and A1C are still higher than they should be. Sometimes it’s necessary to turn to a professional. Someone who can make sense of all the conflicting nutritional advice available on the internet. I finally got a referral from my doctor to see a registered dietician. I look forward to sitting down with a professional who can tell me if intermittent fasting is advisable, if I really need to drink half my body weight in water to lose weight, and whether plant milk is a better nutritional choice than cow milk.
One of the good things that transpired during the pandemic was how so many things went virtual. Five years later, Zoom still allows me to “go” places and “attend” events I wouldn’t be able to if they were offered only in person. But sometimes, online options aren’t the best. For example, thinking I could lift as much as the seasoned Apple Fitness trainer while performing dumbbell crunches, I pulled my trapezius.
In my ongoing attempts to improve my fitness and writing, I often feel like I am failing. I know what I need to do. But sometimes, I don’t do it right, or I don’t do it at all.
Last Monday I attended a chair yoga class that was offered on campus to help students, faculty, and staff manage stress of the impending finals week. In less than twenty minutes, the instructor helped me discover more aches and pains in my back and legs than I knew I had. And on Friday, after an hour-long oyster tasting at O,Miami’s “O,ysters: Taste & Ode” poetry festival event, in less than ten minutes I wrote an ode to the salty mollusk that was good enough I was willing to read it aloud at the end of the event.
Sometimes, life in the flesh brings the energy I need to do what I want to do – to exercise, eat well, write, live purposefully.
Read Valerie’s other work here at Reckon.
Valerie Peralta is an intermittent practitioner of just about everything she does striving to be more tortoise and less hare. After copy editing for two decades, she’s finally trusting her own words on the page. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University; her work has been published by The Blended Future Project and is forthcoming in Heart Balm. She lives in South Florida within running distance of the Everglades.