–noun
1.
bodily or mental exertion, esp. for the sake of training or improvement of health:
2.
something done or performed as a means of practice or training:
3.
a written composition, musical piece, or artistic work executed for practice or to illustrate a particular aspect of technique.
The noun doesn't sound so bad. It's when it becomes a verb that the groaning begins. The thought of verbing exercise, if you're like me, makes your brain sweat before you've even begun. There's always some ceremonious preparation interrupted by finding your lost sneaker, or in the case of writing, that lost pen, or the piece of paper with that guys number on it that you might need one day in case of emergency when you're stuck without...what was it for? It doesn't matter, anything to keep you from beginning said exercise.
It's ridiculous that we avoid that which we claim to love. It's that first five minutes that's the hardest though, be it running, or weight lifting, or those first five minutes after you've picked up your paint brush or sat down in-front of that daunting blinking cursor on your word processor. After that, it's a breeze. Hours fly by unnoticed, other than having to tell Pandora "Yes, I'm still listening."
Soon exercise can become routine, and beyond routine it can become habit, and beyond habit it can become ingrained as a part of your life that keeps you balanced and free. One can never be great at something that they don't practice; Mozart I'm sure composed a few really horrific sounding things before and even between his greatest works. Virginia Woolf threw away crumpled pieces of paper with scribbled lines of garbage bleeding down their pages. Van Gogh ran an angry brush through a skewed vase of flowers a time or two, I'm sure. We must all allow ourselves to be weak, and create until we are strong. We must make ourselves, verb: exercise.
If you read any of our musings when Vanilla was first starting we talked about one sentence exercises. A partner practice where one would create a sentence for the other, and the other created a story (preferably in one paragraph) using that one sentence as the basis of everything that followed.
(You may leave your creation as a comment if you would be interested in sharing your exercise. It is always amusing to see how different minds bend the same sentence!)
Here is my one sentence for you:
The chair creaked beneath her weight, it was the only sound in the meeting hall brimming with people.
Happy exercising!
