An Indie Author Lifestyle Blog
Perhaps you know the feeling. It’s ten until the hour. Your fitness tracker pulses you gently on your wrist. So you pop up from your desk where you’ve been hard at work on your next book (or story or promo pitch) and run in place. Or maybe you jog back and forth in your house, passed perhaps by another person living in the house on the same mindless journey. When your tracker pulses you again to tell you that you’ve gotten your 250 steps for the hour, you return to your desk, sit, and go back to work.
My mischievous monkey mind just flashed me an image of an open office filled with cubicles where dozens of workers simultaneously pop up from their desks to run in place. Or at the local coffeehouse, authors with their laptops hop off their tall stools and shift from foot to foot while they vigorously pump their— I just had to get up to get those 250 steps by walking through the house and met my daughter in the living room doing the same thing. (My daughter and I have become rather competitive in our fitness program. And fairly often, to her chagrin, I receive more steps, more miles, and more active minutes, not to forget all my hourly dots, than she does.)
But let us continue . . .
—arms. Sometimes my daughter gets caught short without her 250 steps completed while I’m driving us to our exercise class. So she starts stamping the floorboard and hitting her seat with her elbows until her fitness tracker gives her the message that she killed it for that hour.
Those little devices can be such tyrants and they’re also addictive, so I’d like to suggest a method of exercise that doesn’t require you to resort to dramatic measures that interfere with your writing or other activities.
What’s the secret of my success? Why, dithering of course. It came to me one day after I started from the home office at the front of the house to do something or whatever in the other end of the house. But by time I arrived in my bedroom, I’d forgotten what it was. Now as a senior citizen, I’m entitled to a certain amount of forgetfulness, but I’d like to suggest that, no matter your age, you too can exercise your way to admirable fitness and good health through purposeful dithering.
Here are some ways that I now dither on purpose to get more steps in my day.
Instead of dragging the hose from the back to the front of the house to water my planters full of zinnias in the front window, I dither back and forth half a dozen times between the kitchen sink and the flowers with a small watering can.
(My neighbor Joan does me even better by watering her plentiful array of flowers a half a Dixie cup at a time. On trash day she also puts the big bins at the curb early, so she has an excuse to amble back and forth with small bags of trash to dispose of or single items to recycle. This method also gives her plentiful opportunities to visit with passersby or to see what the neighbors across the street are up to.)
When I need more steps, sometimes I ferry items one at a time out to the assorted bird feeders in my back yard: a cob of dried corn on one trip and a suet cake on another.
I’ve also developed ways to dither in public without seeming to. For instance, occasionally I go to a grocery store I’m unfamiliar with so I have an excuse to wander freely back and forth from the bakery to the frozen food section several times in search of that special item. Youngsters, you can use this method as well. My daughter has become expert at matching coupons to products to get more steps at our drugstore.
And so in closing, I ask you to feel free to provide other methods of purposeful dithering you might use in the comments section. (P. S. To receive notifications of future blogs like this one, please subscribe.)