Today, if I’ve not miscounted or anything, is day two hundred (UPDATE: I miscounted… it’s day 199!). I’m 166 days out from my goal of a year and a day, but today’s routine wasn’t anything especially great. There was a great transition from double punch to ride the tiger, but that’s about it.

Milestones like today often seem or feel like false progress. It’s like my diet: I had a lot of sugar and carbs last weekend, gained a lot of weight, spent most of the week losing it again, and here it is the weekend again… Lots of plans, lots of ideas about things to do and people to see, and lots of sugar and carbs in the offering. I wonder what I’ll be doing next week?

And yet, if I told people the difference between my Monday weigh-in and my Friday weigh-in, they’d be cheering and excited for me. But if I told them the recent data points over the last month, they’d be glum with me. Yet they’re both just emotions, and not really connected to the diet or my eating habits generally. And so the milestone just passed doesn’t seem all that special any more: my reaction to it is a set of false assumptions.

Back to the tai chi: the other day I had a great workout from my tai chi routine, where I was in horse stance, and a good, rock-solid horse stance, for a forty-five minute stretch of practice. Awesome, right?

Except that the last two days I’ve been sore at knees and hips because of that heavier workout. So I’ve gone considerably easier on myself than I would otherwise. The real milestone was the initiation into being able to perform a horse stance all through the usual practice, finally… But that milestone didn’t line up with today’s numerical milestone. There’s both a separateness and a unity to the two events.

Maybe this doesn’t make much sense. I’m not sure I’m done sorting it in my own mind.

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