Something New

One day last week I mulled and thought and planned and finally pulled out my all-purpose backpack and started packing: towel, check! swimsuit, check! all things needed to transition from swimming pool to Lunch with the Ladies, check! And I got into my car and drove down the road, headed for the university natatorium. (And here I have to mention that my spell check is telling me: sanatorium, but I am quite healthy and I MEANT natatorium. I don't know why K-State just doesn't call it a swimming pool.) I was going to go swim some laps. I haven't gone to lap swim for a long, long time. So long in fact that I wasn't too comfortable with the aspect of getting into a swimsuit and sliding into the cold water amongst the REAL athletes who do this everyday on their lunch hour. But I felt like mixing it up a bit - a change in my day.

Halfway down the road, I noticed my Rec Pass wasn't attached to my key ring. Odd. I turned around and drove back home and searched the house. Nothing. Well, I thought, if it's gone, it's gone, and I'll need to drive over to the main Rec Center on campus, pay my $5 for a new one, and rush over to the natatorium before all the lap lanes get full. (I thought if I got there right at 11:25, I could beat the Olympians.) Sadly, a comedy of errors commenced (find a park at the Rec, find enough (any!) change for the meter (or receive a $60 parking ticket - wow, that would be an expensive swimming expedition), get my new Rec Pass, find a park at the natatorium, fail, drive around the block twice, fail twice more, and decision time: No time to swim. However, I did have a luncheon date, and I had not bothered cleaning up before my planned swim. So, back to the Rec to have a shower at that place, before lunch. Find a park, dig around for 20 minutes' worth of change...

So the whole idea behind my lap swim plan was to do something out of my ordinary day. A few days later I read something that made me think, and gave me an idea...a plan...

Last year about this time, I spent the 12 weeks before Christmas accomplishing one major task each week. That was a very good exercise for me. As I mentioned in a blog a couple of days ago, the premise is that if you do something regularly for three weeks, it becomes habit. Accomplishing a major task once a week didn't make me want to reroof the house and dig a new well or anything like that, but it did make me see bigger and smaller pictures of things I could get done on a weekly basis.

With that in mind, I think these next twelve weeks will involve my trying something new each week. I haven't plotted the whats or hows, but I know it will involve learning new things and I know that it won't involve skydiving or bronc busting.

Oh, and about that non-swim day? Part of the impetus for my Twelve Weeks of New is just how far out of my comfort zone I was with the idea of going to swim laps in a pool full of total strangers. I should push myself to do new things more often.

Care to join me in these twelve weeks?