“But what are you doing for exercise, Shala?”

When I worked at the middle school library, movement was baked into my day. I walked to work (admittedly a short distance), spent the day on my feet shelving, helping students, moving things around the library, running errands around the school, and walking back home at day’s end. This is a terrible description of my work in the library, but the point is, I was in almost constant motion for six to seven hours a day. Lots of it was standing, of course, but my standing job was active enough that the few times I tried sitting on a chair, I ended up pushing the chair aside because it was too much trouble to sit and have to get up again all the time.

The upshot was I logged an hour’s worth of exercise per my Apple Watch every single day without doing anything particularly fancy to accomplish it. And since I did all this in an N95, my cardiac health improved. My blood pressure, which had been flirting with being too high when the pandemic started, dropped back to normal ranges. My resting heart rate plummeted 10-15 points to start hanging out in the 60s for the first time in my life. Aah, the under-appreciated benefits of masking – fewer allergies and healthier hearts.

Me, prepped to enter the library, after taking a lunch break outside in April 2023. (Photo: Shala Howell)But I’m at home now, and I tend to forget to take exercise breaks when I’m writing

I also don’t need to mask at home, except for when I’m doing those things that kick up a bunch of the dust and cat dander that I am so profoundly allergic to — or on the random days when I need to pick up something from the store. I like not wearing a mask all the time, even if I am more aware of how socially awkward is to wearing a mask in public on the few occasions that I need one. And I really like not having massive allergy attacks and spending the rest of the day sneezing just because I spent five minutes dusting, cleaning the litter box, pushing laundry, or emptying the vacuum cleaner.

The trouble with being able to live most of my life now without the increased cardiac load of an N95 is that I’m just not getting as much cardio as I used to. My resting heart rate began to inch back up.

Solution: PE, Shala-style

I keep a planner logging all of my coursework for my regular grad school classes, so naturally I use part of it to set aside time for “PE.”

My stated goal for this self-made and self-directed PE class is 150 minutes of exercise per week as recorded on my Apple Watch. That’s the easiest for me to track. But what I really want is to preserve that sweet low resting heart rate and the newly reclaimed normal blood pressure which all that movement baked into my days at the library gave me. I am not an athlete. I am not training for anything in particular. What I want is something sustainable that raises my heart rate and I’m not that precious about what that thing looks like, other than it needs to be a thing that I will be willing to do at regular intervals over time.

Walks, bike rides, and house cleaning… oh my!

I love walks and bike rides. So at least three days a week, I take a 45 minute walk or bike ride as a brain break between my two major daily working periods (yes, this is a fancy way of saying “lunch”). When it’s too rainy to walk or ride, I tell my Apple Watch I’m taking a walk and then start cleaning the house in a manner that boosts and keeps my heart rate in my target heart rate range until an hour has passed or my Apple Watch congratulates me on closing my exercise ring, whichever comes first. This works best if I make sure to take the stairs a lot in an extremely inefficient manner while I’m cleaning.

Once or twice a month, Michael and I will go on a hike somewhere over the weekend, which gives me a chance to check in to see if I’m improving, staying the same, or being too easy on myself during “PE” each week. Sometimes my daughter joins us. (Photo: Shala Howell)Decluttering for health and sanity

Once or twice a week, I spend an hour sorting and decluttering my house. It’s really important on decluttering days to only pick jobs that I can finish completely within the span of an hour. During the week, I don’t have “Clean out your entire pantry” kind of time. I have “Clean out one shelf in your pantry” kind of time. Fortunately, my house has a seemingly endless number of small but irritating and fixable jobs that I can start and finish in an hour.

To find them, I simply allow myself to notice things that I would otherwise purposefully overlook as I’m moving around the house, and I write them down on a decluttering list.

The kitchen cabinet that is so full I have to stuff and pile and plead with our dishes to fit every time I clean the kitchen. The top of my dresser. The top of my desk. The expired tea. The medicine cabinet full of expired cold medicines and lotions. The stack of pictures under the stairs that has been waiting so long to be hung up that I’ll need to dust them before I even think about hanging them up. The carpet of old shoes that I have to kick aside or stand on when I’m reaching for things on the top shelf of my closet.

On the days I’m not decluttering, I allow myself to notice things like this that bother me about how our house does–or, more accurately, does not–work, instead of forcing myself to ignore them. On decluttering days, I work on whatever surface or cabinet I’ve noticed currently bothers me the most. If I can’t think of anything in particular to do that day, I pick a thing off my list.

One week, it was a kitchen cabinet’s worth of random glassware and coffee mugs that I cleaned out and took to Goodwill. The week after Halloween, it was our leftover Halloween candy (we always buy as if we are going to get a horde and never get more than two sets of Trick-or-Treaters), 40 mini party-favor sized bubble jars that I also bought to give out and didn’t need, and two boxes of compostable tableware that I bought for a Spring 2020 party that we ended up storing instead of using (lockdown!), all of which I donated to the Wellness Center at my daughter’s high school. Eventually I’ll need to tackle those shoes.

My “homework” is to clear one box or two bags of stuff every week, including dropping it off at its target resting place so that I never have to think about it again. This means focusing on things I have too many of and already know how to dispose of, like books, kitchenware, catalogs/magazines, and clothes. I am not dealing with things that require work or additional planning before they can safely disposed of, like electronics.

I’m really enjoying seeing empty–or at least more functional–spaces take the place of all those piles that I used to have to actively ignore. I have a long way to go, but frankly, there’s no danger that I’ll run out of One-Box-a-Week Decluttering jobs between now and finishing my Masters in May 2025.

My final project for “PE” last semester was making full use of our city’s November clean-up day. The city took away our old lawn furniture, an old plasma TV, and a broken fridge to be recycled, donated, and/or otherwise responsibly disposed of, solving some hard problems for me. I love this program. (Photo: Shala Howell)What about this semester?

This semester, I’m focusing on the essentials – the why of all this and have added in some weekly blood pressure “quizzes” to my weekly decluttering drops. At semester’s end, I’ll pull together another “Hard Decluttering Problems” final project for the city to deal with on its May Clean-out Day. But I’ll also add in a 7-day series of blood pressure measurements to see if I’m getting enough movement to keep my blood pressure in normal ranges, and adjust my exercise / decluttering ratio according (decluttering is great for my mental health, but it doesn’t do much for my heart rate).

Is it really fair to call this “PE” though?

Does it matter? It makes me smile to think of it this way, because it is absolutely the lowest PE bar ever. It certainly hasn’t made up for the hours and hours of movement I got each day while working in a proper library, but it’s a start. I track it in the same planner I use to track my other coursework, and that helps me remember to set aside time to get it done, and to celebrate my intermittent decluttering milestones.

If I were to grade my progress, I would give myself a “Yay!” in decluttering and a “Meets expectations-Sigh” for walks and bike rides. Fortunately, I am not training for the Olympics here. I am just training to still be able to walk 2 miles a day when I’m 80, and in the meantime, make it a little easier to like living in my house. A different bar, but it works for me.

Related Links

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