Priorities

Lately my weight has been creeping up again. Not a lot, just that pound every few weeks that seems like nothing at the time but spells utter ruination and devastation if allowed to continue unchecked. I know the secret to losing weight, in case you're interested. It involves eating less and exercising more. To be specific, in my case, it involves NOT finishing all the leftover Christmas stocking candy, and then finishing all the Valentine's Day candy (and I just bought not one, but two bags, of those conversation hearts, in the little size and the big size, and they're not even that good), and then starting in on Easter candy (I had my first Cadbury egg yesterday, and they are delicious!). And it involves daily walks of at least an hour, something I stopped doing when it became so bitter cold a week or two ago, and when I started focusing desperate attention on writing my novel.

Here's the problem, for me. I really need to start prioritizing weight loss, or at the very least prioritizing walking. But I'm already prioritizing writing my book. And I blogged a while ago about how this is the year to prioritize poetry. And by definition, you cannot prioritize EVERYTHING. If something gets "priority," then it comes first. By definition, you can't put EVERYTHING first.

This is why I so much like creating the new life for myself at the start of every month. It really does seem to me that for a few days I actually can put everything first: write more, AND walk more, AND eat better, AND read more. But then I can't sustain that much perfection, and so I'm back in the land of having to do this rather than that, the land of leaving something, even something fairly important, undone. The title of my blog is "An Hour a Day," and I really get just one FIRST hour of the day, the hour in which I do the thing that matters most, which for me usually is writing.

So: what to do? This is one of those blog posts that I write to help myself figure something out. I do know that part of the secret to doing everything is getting up early - NOT at 5:45 as I did today, but at 5:00, or even 4:30. Part of the secret to doing everything is NOT spending too much time on email. My latest email vice? Emailing my daily poem to my two poetry buddies and then reading over my sent email fifty or sixty times to admire my poem. That is not a good use of my time.

I think I'm still going to prioritize writing for the next month and let myself get just a little bit fatter, though maybe I'll take that second bag of conversation hearts into the philosophy department and leave them in the graduate student lounge. And I won't announce in class how much I love Cadbury hearts and invite students to show their appreciation of me by leaving some in my philosophy department mailbox. And I'm going to walk all the way in to work today, about three miles.

After I write my chapter. And after I write my poem.