Showing posts with label schedule. Show all posts
Showing posts with label schedule. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Emiko: Day 19, Rest After the Rope

Hello, there!

Today was fairly uneventful, PCP-wise. Tuesday is my heaviest school day, I'm pretty much tied up between 1-9pm, so there isn't much opportunity for recipes or revelations of that sort. Although, Adrian did get us limes at the grocery store the other day, and they are most delicious squeezed over a spicy-turkey-patty, tomato, avocado, whole-wheat-pita wrapped sandwich! mmm! (Patrick is right, PCP round 2 is totally obsessed with food! But all the better for the PCP Cookbook, right?)

As far as exercises went...well, they didn't really. I took my rest day today. I was planning on going through my Work Out 2 exercises, but after finishing the jump ropes I was all outta steam. I got a side cramp about half way through the 1,500 jumps, and had to limit my last sets to about 100-150 jumps. I also kept tripping a lot more than usual, and kind of wanted to make a noose out of that twisted jump rope (as displayed in Tim's Day 18 post...he he). I stretched out in between, swirling my body around and stretching from side-to-side, but that cramping just wouldn't pass! So after finishing with the jumps I went upstairs and called it a day. It is really nice to have a rest day when you need it.

Still haven't settled into a balance between work, PCP, and school. I will begin working less next week which will help, but both the PCP and school feel like full-time jobs unto themselves!

Thus it is time to get to bed. I must get my required 8-hours of sleep, and I still have to finish my drawing hw for tomorrow's class! Hope you all are well out there, and good night!

P.S. Spilled the beans about the PCP to my Dad today, and he was equally unsurprised as my mom!

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Adrian: Day 14, Time flies!

Nate mentioned in his last post a very interesting quality of time:

"
...when we are busy time goes really fast in the moment, but in retrospect seems to have been forever. And when we have little to do in the moment time seems to drag but in retrospect went very fast. "

That's definitely been true for me. Working from home gives me a lot of time to do whatever I please, and usually, it doesn't amount to much activity. Prior to PCP, there was lots of reading involved. And walking, lots of walking. Walking to book stores and more reading. I've gone for a couple weeks without knowing what day it was. Maybe this is what the Zen masters were alluding to when they spoke of "no mind".

Probably not. But speaking of Zen, I came across a really interesting quote in a book I was reading today:

"To observe the regulations and keep to the rules is tying oneself without a rope. To act freely and unrestrainedly just as one wishes is to do what heretics and demons would do."

The quote goes on quite a bit, but those first two lines I find particularly relevant now in terms of how we've all been thinking about time and structure.

Our relationships with others are very intimately and almost exclusively related to our schedules. There are the people we socialize with when we have to be at work, and people we talk to when we're at school. There are friends that we see on the weekends, that we meet for dinner, and that we see only on birthdays. There are our parents, who we may see very little of. The person you live with you might see even less of. These social rules are incredibly powerful, and they define all of our relationships. There's seemingly very little room left for choice.

But these schedules, these routines, we have to keep them, how else would we live? At the same time, this is the invisible rope which binds us together, or keeps us separate from one another.

The second sentence of the quote is about separation. And I feel like it very much applies to a person like me. I have felt like a 'heretic' and an outcast many times in life (
very strongly during high school). I was always very opposed to going with the flow. But going against the flow for too long may result in much suffering and eventually drowning. Without routine or schedule, our relationships become severed. When no one cares about you, its easy not to care about yourself.

So tell me, what is the right way?