January 14, day 14 of the Ultimate Blog Challenge. I have digressed from working on Susannah Conway’s 2022 workbook Unravel Your Year. It is work and it would be easy for me to dump it. But my word for the year is FOCUS. I’m big on words, being authentic and congruent. If I am all that, I have to live up to them. Let’s see if I can get back to it. Let me work on the questions in groups. I am still unravelling 2021. It’s a slow process when I am a slow poke and a procrastinator. The first group of questions are:

How have you taken care of yourself physically?

How have you taken care of yourself mentally?

How have you taken care of yourself emotionally?

I wonder how do you separate the mental from the emotional health. Here’s how one website describes the difference.

A good way to think about mental and emotional health is like a tag team. Mental health refers to your ability to process information. Emotional health, on the other hand, refers to your ability to express feelings which are based upon the information you have processed.

These 3 areas of health go hand in hand. One affects the other. I try for balance in all, though I do tend to get obsessive now and again and go a little overboard. It doesn’t last long because my body tells me, whoa, time to slow it down, or cut back a little. I’ve learned to listen to my body more carefully. Right at this very moment, I’m hit with a wave of sleepiness. It could mean a couple of things. One- a high carb hit from devouring a very yummy slice of pumpkin pie, my very first effort made with sweetened condensed milk. The condensed milk was a happy accident. I meant to use evaporated milk. A second reason for my sleepiness could be the cloudy and much warmer weather. I’m a weather vane. I feel every sudden change.

What does that have to do with taking care of myself? I do wander and digress a bit. Workbooks and questions are difficult. But it’s good to know what makes me tick, all my quirks. Understanding how my body works makes it easier to care for. I’m really struggling with energy these last 2 days. Even so, I still go out for my daily ski in winter. The fresh air and moving perks up my serotonin and energy levels for the day. I’m less likely to get irked and bothersome. On days when I can’t make it out, I do my qigong and hula hoop. In summer, I get my daily oomph from swimming, walking, biking and gardening. All these activities keep my body and mind healthy and strong.

I could have chosen an easier project to write on for this challenge. I wish I had but what is a challenge without a struggle? I do like difficult things – very hard crossword puzzles, hard cross-stitch patterns, multi-pieced quilt blocks, etc. The cross-stitch of Jesus took me 10 plus years. My queen sized quilt is still waiting to be stitched up. These challenges keep me mentally fit. I have things to figure out and put together. I am never sitting in idle boredom. There’s always books to be read and videos to be watched on how to’s.

These are some of the things that I do to keep myself together, though I don’t feel that at the moment. Life is hard. And that is also a challenge for me to work on. What a good project, eh?