Is walking the cure?

I exhort my students -- and anyone who will listen -- to keep a journal, as you know by now. Jot things down. Keep notes. Pay attention, as the poet Mary Oliver might have said.

And sometimes my own little scribbled messages or entries in my digital diary work their way into published pieces. For example, recording Leo's early speech -- saying 'lello' instead of yellow and hangerburger for the meat you have with hotdogs -- was the subject of an essay I wrote for The New York Times about the "shooting star" of a child's early attempts at speech. And I was able to include bits of early dialogue that I'd recorded in my journal.

But one essay I wrote actually included a Google calendar alert. "Is walking the cure?"

I use the alerts for anything and everything. Even: "Take a shower." And sometimes I will use them to register a problem I am facing, if only to get me to face it.

The problem was insomnia, brought on by our rocky relocation to Connecticut. Within the space of three weeks, we'd left Atlanta, moved into a new house in Connecticut, enrolled Leo in kindergarten and resumed our work. In my case, resuming work meant doing something completely new -- namely teaching Italian while also earning a graduate degree in Italian literature.

(On a related note, I will say walking is miraculous! But I digress...)

I wrote about all of this for the AJC (Atlanta's main daily newspaper) after they published a longer essay I wrote about leaving Atlanta for good. Here's an excerpt:

The fall had been a long, hard slog. One recurring Google alert I had set for myself read: “Is walking the cure?” Google alerts, post-it notes, scraps of paper shoved in my pocket. Until earlier this year, it was how I managed my life in Atlanta, teaching, editing and writing whenever possible while also running after a five-year-old – my son, Leo. The reminders keep me on track with writing assignments, grant applications and groceries.

Not so with this note. “Is walking the cure?”

I was grasping at a solution because in the short time since leaving Atlanta last summer and moving to Connecticut for a new life up North, I’d suffered the worst insomnia in five years. I could log at best six hours of shut-eye night after night, despite putting in long hours as a new part-time professor of Italian at a college in Connecticut. In between lessons, I was trying to master dozens of new tasks, including the route to campus, my students’ names and staggered class schedules (Italian I, for example, met at 9:30, except Mondays when it met at 9:05).

But none of this frenzy of activity moved me to sleep more than six hours. I would jog around the field behind our house some mornings, making me energetic on the surface, exhausted just below.  

You can read the rest of the essay here (you'll have to scroll down a bit):

http://specials.myajc.com/pj-past-2017/