Often in the morning I sit with my morning coffee and write in my journal. Sometimes it begins like: went to bed a bit later last night, so I stayed in bed until about quarter of eight this morning. It’s a tremendous luxury, not to have someplace I need to be, first thing in the morning. This shift to mostly online teaching is sometimes not as fun as actually spending hours with students and having good discussions. But it has advantages like allowing me to have this very flexible daily schedule. Even to travel, if I arrange things carefully ahead of time.
I sort-of feel, though, that I have a responsibility to use the time wisely and productively. I’ve been keeping two books, since the new year. We’re a month into 2026 and I’ve been doing a pretty good job, keeping them up. One is a yellow hardcover weekly planner. I’m using four colors of pens to plan and check off daily stuff. The other is an orange hardcover journal where I’m recording my health info daily.
I’ve been trying to get to a much more sustainable level with my health (weight) and daily exercising. I did a good job, I thought, walking nearly daily last year and I even managed to begin biking again. So, 2025 was a good step in the direction of better health. I had a doctor’s appointment where all my blood tests and my blood pressure and all that looked good. That may have been the peak for 2025, actually, and I may have let it slip a bit as the winter began. Got an indoor exercise bike and renewed my Y membership so I can work out a bit and sit in the sauna. So, hopefully I’ll be able to regain and continue that progress.
Trying to eat better and stay in ketosis most of the time too, this year. I’ve really started focusing on this since the new year and have had a pretty good first month. Right now, this morning, not so good, since I had some leftover soup from the freezer for dinner, made from the holiday turkey, which had not only veggies but some pasta and rice in it. As a result, no ketones this morning and blood glucose in the low one-hundreds. Today I’ll start eating just sardines again, for a few days.
These may seem like silly practices to report to readers. I’m not here to argue about whether they’re the best thing for me to be doing or not. I felt pretty good last time I did a seven-day sardine “fast” and I lost ten pounds. Be that as it may, I think the bigger point is that I’m doing something to try to improve myself. It’s a bit like the thing the stoics say, that the point isn’t what happens as how you respond to what happens. These little practices I choose to do and then follow through by actually doing, are how I respond to what happens.
I almost wrote, “how you react to what happens”. But in an example of the “writing is thinking” idea I was teaching my in-person students this week (we’re reading the handbook together), I wrote “respond” instead. I don’t think you really get to choose how you’re going to react. But I think I do have a choice about how I respond. In a nearly century-old pulp science fiction series I’ve just been recently rereading for fun (Null-A by A.E. Van Vogt), the protagonist practices a mental procedure called the “cortico-thalamic pause”, which the author describes as this deliberate moment of preventing oneself from flying off the handle and reacting instinctively or emotionally to what’s happening around us. As often happens in these types of stories, Van Vogt takes something pretty basic and common-sensical, and dresses it up into something he pretends is deeply innovative and radical. And he’s inconsistent about it, too. Turns out, the protagonist triumphs not so much because he practices non-Aristotelian logic (that’s the “Null-A”), but because he’s an alien superman with two brains! Oh, well. It was still a pretty decent story, for its day.
So in any case, the reason I’m taking these paragraphs that began as a private morning journal entry and publishing them as a blog post is that I think they relate to the “Lifelong Learner” project. Not the specifics of what I’m doing. I’m not suggesting that anybody else eat sardines or buy two books to plan and report in, day to day. I suppose what I am doing is mentioning those as a couple of examples, among the nearly infinite number available, of ways I’m trying to make little, gradual, incremental changes in my days, that will add up over the weeks, months, and ultimately the year 2026. It’s now mid-morning and my plan for the rest of the day is to get cleaned up, read and comment on student work, grade a bit of it, prepare next week’s course content, do a bit of my own research on my White Pine Lumber or Gilded Ages projects, eat sardines and drink coffee, walk (indoors, it’s very icy out), and sauna. I’ve jotted each of those on today’s box in my planner, so I’ll be able to check them off when I do them. In three different colors, for “health”, “work”, and “study”. That’s the plan. Nothing epic, just incremental.