#134: Big commitments loosely held

Gut-checking our January verve

On January 1st of this year, like several January 1sts before it, I started a 30-day yoga challenge on YouTube. In prior years, I have both failed the challenges (quit mid-month) and completed them (on January 31st), but until now, I’d never finished one in February, as that’s simply not how the challenge is designed. The boundaries—January 1st to January 31st—are definitional. You either complete the challenge or you don’t. The point is to practice 30 days in a row, even when you don’t want to, even when it’s 11 p.m. and you’re a little tipsy (surprisingly kind of fun). This year I’ll finish today, on February 5th. And in an unlikely turn, I consider this a more compelling triumph.

The delinquency started on January 9th when I got sick and legitimately couldn’t practice, and the lapses followed from there: busy days, tired days, just-not-in-the-mood days. I’d make up the skips by doing two sessions in a row, or else I’d further enable the February creep. By most accounts, this was a sloppy, pathetic way to complete the challenge—counter to the spirit of it except in the most boring, patronizing sense of “any amount of activity is good!” which is not the point I’m trying to make. The true spirit, I think, is to experience the mental and physical payoffs of commitment and consistency. It’s interesting, then, that it felt so right to slack off a little.

This insight emerged early, when I noticed I experienced no guilt or sense of failure when I deviated from the schedule. When I missed days, I didn’t care; when I doubled up, it felt good; when, on day 27, I found the instructor’s routine so mind-numbing that I stopped following it and did whatever I wanted, I welcomed my own refusal like a vote of self-confidence. Early on, Avi made a joke that we needed to start the whole challenge over in February—that our loose yoga morals had canceled out whatever gains we were after. But I said: Absolutely not. It was fine! We were doing it, basically. In fact our approach felt more evolved, somehow, than strict adherence.

In last week’s Dear Baby, I wrote about the fresh start fallacy: the (flawed) idea that wiping the slate clean and starting over is always better than continuing on in spite of your setbacks. The appeal to the fresh start is clear; it’s the perfectionist’s way. I think “healthy habits” that are rigid and rules-based speak to this same longing. It’s comforting to feel that the roadmap is laid out for us, that our only job is to follow the directions to salvation. But once we’ve wandered from the path, the original promise broken, who knows where our actions will lead us? Better to just abandon the effort or start again, promises re-made, naive hopes restored. Like bumper lanes for the ambitious, rules keep us pointed in the right direction.

I’ve been fond of them all my life. One afternoon when I was in high school, loitering around my house with my friend Stacy, we became obsessed with getting six-pack abs. Overhearing us, my dad said it wouldn’t be that hard if we were dedicated (as dads do). We asked him what he thought it would take. He said three sets of 30 sit-ups—the slow, hard kind—every day for three months, or something like that. We were track and soccer athletes, so this would be on top of our hours of daily exercise, now unthinkable. We didn’t believe him, so we drafted up a contract, ball-point on printer paper: If we followed his rules, he promised we would have six-packs by the end. We all signed.

Stacy and I started doing the sit-ups in our jeans during our free period on the floor of a library meeting room, often getting interrupted because the room looked empty to other students, which we found hilarious. We kept it up for a few weeks, and when we missed a day, the contract broken, we abandoned the whole thing. This fit with our 15-year-old work ethic; we were fast runners, but not opposed to splitting off from cross-country practice to eat brownie batter at her house, rejoining our team on their run back to school, chocolate around our mouths. The primary appeal of the contract wasn’t that it would improve our core strength, which we didn’t care about, but that it was guaranteeing us visible results. I remember feeling awed by my dad’s promise. So few things in life are guaranteed. I think I knew that even then.

It can be easier, counterintuitively, to commit to something strict than to something loose. If my dad had told us we would probably get six packs if we made an effort over the next year to do regular ab workouts, we would have been a lot less interested in the proposition (although to be clear we didn’t get six-packs either way). This is a well-known phenomenon of course, propping up entire industries. Moderation doesn’t sell. In most ways I’ve wisened to that fact with age, but my annual 30-day-yoga challenge is one of the remaining vestiges of my fetish for short-term discipline. So it felt particularly note-worthy that, this year, I couldn’t muster the fascination nor the guilt required. Instead, my wavering dedication felt like growth. Not because “perfect is the enemy of good,” but because it can actually be harder, in a way, to keep a looser, intuition-driven commitment than a strict one that requires less creativity.

One year ago, I wrote about the value of short-term habits, inspired by the one month I was dedicated to morning journaling, after which I stopped cold turkey. The essay was a polemic against the popular notion that only sustainable habits are worth pursuing. I see today’s newsletter as a corollary to that one—and also this one about inconsistency as a rule, or this one about the trap of legibility, or even my recent essay about the value of the messy middle—all of which point to my obsession with the possibilities of disorder, an interest surely borne of my life-long affection for control.

Keeping with the 30-day challenge as designed would have been useful in some ways, there’s no doubting that. But my less structured approach begot a certain wisdom, too. I trusted my instincts when I broke the rules, I did extra when it felt right, and I regarded my efforts using internal, figurative measures versus more external, observable ones. In the end, I still finished. To consider this year’s challenge a failure wouldn’t just be unnecessarily self-punishing, it would be wrong. I learned a lot this past month: about how to be pliable but with an aim, about how to surrender without giving up. As Anne Lamott put it, “​​Beauty is a miracle of things going together imperfectly.” Rigidity and compliance are satisfying, but flexibility takes self-discipline, too. Just a different kind than the one we’ve been taught to revere.

My favorite thing I read last week was “Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy,” by Joshua Rothman for The New Yorker. A beautiful (2014!) essay that made me cry. Fridays’ 15 things also included a newsletter I can’t stop thinking about, a new-ish song that reminds me of being 19 (in a good way), my new favorite shoes, and more. The rec of the week was things to do alone in London, for my upcoming trip. Overwhelmed by good suggestions! My podcast on Tuesday will be a Voice Note on three ideas I can’t stop thinking about.

Hope you have a nice Sunday!
Haley

p.s. I’m considering doing a Substack-themed Q&A, since I get asked about it fairly often. If you have questions you’d like me to answer that pertain to writing/producing this (or a) newsletter, feel free to reply to this email and I’ll add it to my list!