As of late I've been feeling happier and more grateful. They seem to feed off each other: happiness brings gratefulness and gratefulness brings happiness. At the same time I look back and I wonder what I was so unhappy about, but this is something I also wondered while being unhappy.
The things I've been grateful about are varied. Especially salient is how incredibly fortunate I've been with restarting my professional career and the financial stability that comes with it. Having a joint quest with other people is engaging, especially if you have smart and wise leadership. There's mutual admiration with my colleagues, I admire their intelligence and they seem to value my wisdom. I also like the way in which they're amazed at the amount and quality of food that I eat and they seem to pick up some cues as I see they bring healthier food and comment it with me.
I feel my sense of belonging often has to do with the contribution I can bring to a group. I don't need to be appreciated (though it's nice), it mostly has to do with my own perception. However, I have a bias and I tend to have higher expectations about my contribution than what my bosses have.
I've been thinking about my emotions picker. In the NRC-VAD system for classifying emotions there's a third dimension which is stated but not visualized: dominance. Dominance is the agency aspect of an emotion. Being angry is high dominance: you are unsettled yet in control. Being afraid is not. But this morning, as I was biking towards work I thought "what would high agency fear look like? Ah, that's called courage". Disgust + agency is contempt.
Our interfaces are still designed for two dimensions, and thus it's not straightforward to register the three at the same time. You can register two dimensions easily by dragging your finger or cursor through a cartesian plane, but the third dimension need to be a separate slider because I can't move in the third dimension on the screen.
I'm hosting my previous guest from Couchsurfing again, this time on her way back to Brazil. As she works giving private language tutoring in the evenings, we have little overlapping time and I like to leave her the space to work after I come back to yoga, so I've been going to the calisthenics part at night.
I don't know why I hadn't even considered this option before. I can smoke my evening grass and work out in ways which yoga lacks, especially pulling exercises which are great to counteract the endless pushing from chaturangas. I feel my back sore, I had forgotten what it feels like to be sore.
I'm bulking at an alarming rate without gaining fat. If I wasn't myself, I'd suspect I was on steroids. I haven't weighed myself in two years so I don't know how much I've gained numerically, but when I look at myself in the mirror I think "dude that's me?". I'm starting to get chest cleavage in my sternum which is unprecedented.
My shoulders are amazingly healthy and mobile now. I used to struggle with shoulder impingement and rotator cuff issues, but about two years ago I finally learned the relationship between scapular movement and shoulder compression: as long as you use your scapulae to press against the floor, your shoulders remain uncompressed and healthy. Having scapular proprioception is no small feat however, if as they say "the body keeps the [emotional] score", then the reason why I've experienced so much unprompted shame in the last years is because they were stored in my back, and they emerge as I mobilize it.
The body has been the most amazing and introverted journey I've embarked on. It's discovering the body within the body in the same way we discover the mind within the mind when we meditate.
I remember once asking my sister if the baseline of her existence was painful, like if you sit quiet do you feel your body and emotional state aching? She said no, and it seemed strange to me at the time. At this place and time I notice the unnatural state is being in pain, even if it's a low grade but persistent pain.
Another thing to be grateful about.