I Started Doing Yoga

Last month, I tried swimming. I went to the pool with my friend. The water was cold at first. I swam for twenty minutes. After that, I was tired but happy. I want to go again next week.

Last year, I started cooking. I am not a young person, and I never cooked much before. Now I cook three or four times a week. I go to the supermarket on Saturday and buy food for the week. The first time I cooked rice, it was bad — the rice was hard. But I tried again. Now I can make rice and three other dishes. It is not difficult, but it takes time. I feel good when I eat my own food. I think I will keep cooking.

Six months ago, I started walking. I do not mean walking as exercise, with special clothes and a tracker on my wrist. I mean walking after dinner, around my neighbourhood, for about twenty minutes. I started because my doctor said, very mildly, that I should move a little more, and because the evenings at home had begun to feel too long and too quiet. The first week was strange. I felt self-conscious, as if my neighbours could tell I was walking on doctor's orders. After a week, this passed. I began to notice things I had not noticed before — which houses had cats in the windows, where the streetlights were broken, the way the air smelled different on the night before rain. I have walked, since then, almost every evening I have been at home. Some nights I walk for ten minutes, some nights for forty. It depends on the day I have had. I should be honest: it has not transformed my life. I have not become a different person. My health is, I think, a little better, in ways that are hard to measure. What has changed is more specific. I think more clearly between dinner and sleep. I argue less with the people I live with, because by the time I come home from the walk, the small irritations of the day have settled. I sleep better. None of this is impressive enough to recommend to anyone. But I have come to think that the small things you do for yourself, quietly and without drama, are sometimes the most useful — and that walking around your own neighbourhood, on the doctor's mild advice, after a long day, might be one of them.

Six months ago, I started cooking properly, which is a sentence that requires several immediate clarifications. I do not mean cooking as performance, of the sort that ends up on social media with a particular kind of soft yellow lighting. I mean cooking the way ordinary people in ordinary kitchens cooked for several centuries before the rest of us forgot how — three or four real meals a week, made from things bought intentionally rather than panic-purchased on the way home from work. I had not been doing this. I had been ordering. I had been ordering, in fact, in such a settled way that the apps on my phone had begun to predict my dinner before I had thought about it, which is the kind of small surrender I had not previously had the energy to be embarrassed about. The thing that pushed me into starting was unimpressive. My doctor mentioned my cholesterol in passing, my flatmate mentioned the cost of my deliveries in passing, and on the same week a friend gave me a cookbook for my birthday that contained, in its first chapter, a single sentence I have thought about often since: 'You don't have to be good at this. You just have to do it twice a week.' I did the first dish on a Sunday — a tomato pasta whose tomatoes I scorched, the recipe for which I will not embarrass myself by reproducing here. It was edible. It was, in some narrow sense, dinner. I have, since then, cooked twice a week most weeks, with several gaps when work has overrun. The discoveries have not been the discoveries I had pictured. I had pictured a transformation — fitter, calmer, more at home in my kitchen. The actual changes are smaller. I notice what I have eaten, in a way that the apps had been preventing. I have made the same recipe enough times to know which of my own preferences matter and which I made up because the cookbook said to. I am not, I should be clear, a 'cook' yet — the phrase still feels too big. What I am is someone who, on the third Tuesday in a row, has bought an onion on the way home and chopped it without consulting an app. That, for now, is what I have. I should also flag, because the genre tends to skip it, that the version of cooking I am dipping into is quite specific — Western European, recipe-led, broadly middle-class. There are kitchens, in this city and elsewhere, where people have been doing this for generations on much less and with much more skill than I will ever have. The fact that I am writing four hundred words about chopping an onion is, in that wider context, a piece of information about me rather than about the onion. I would rather know that than not. The mat — sorry, the cookbook — lives by the kitchen now, where for the first month it lived on a high shelf, as if I had not yet decided.

Six months ago, I started cooking properly, which is a sentence that requires several immediate clarifications, the first of which is that the word 'properly' is doing more work than I am quite prepared to defend. I do not mean cooking as performance, of the soft-yellow-lighting variety. I mean cooking the way ordinary people in ordinary kitchens cooked for several centuries before the rest of us forgot how — three or four real meals a week, made from things bought intentionally rather than panic-purchased on the way home from work. I had not been doing this. I had been ordering. I had been ordering, in fact, in such a settled way that the apps on my phone had begun to predict my dinner before I had thought about it, which is the kind of small surrender I had not previously had the energy to be embarrassed about. The thing that pushed me into starting was unimpressive. My doctor mentioned my cholesterol in passing, my flatmate mentioned the cost of my deliveries in passing, and on the same week a friend gave me a cookbook for my birthday that contained, in its first chapter, a single sentence I have thought about often since: 'You don't have to be good at this. You just have to do it twice a week.' I did the first dish on a Sunday — a tomato pasta whose tomatoes I scorched, the recipe for which I will not embarrass myself by reproducing here. It was edible. It was, in some narrow sense, dinner. I have, since then, cooked twice a week most weeks, with several gaps when work has overrun. The discoveries have not been the discoveries I had pictured. I had pictured a transformation — fitter, calmer, more at home in my kitchen. The actual changes are smaller. I notice what I have eaten, in a way that the apps had been preventing. I have made the same recipe enough times to know which of my own preferences matter and which I made up because the cookbook said to. I notice my body's response to particular foods, in a way I had been outsourcing to the algorithmic suggestions of a delivery app. I am not, I should be clear, a 'cook' yet — the phrase still feels too big. What I am is someone who, on the third Tuesday in a row, has bought an onion on the way home and chopped it without consulting an app. That, for now, is what I have. I should also flag, because the genre tends to skip it, that the version of cooking I am dipping into is quite specific — Western European, recipe-led, broadly middle-class. There are kitchens, in this city and elsewhere, where people have been doing this for generations on much less and with much more skill than I will ever have. The fact that I am writing six hundred words about chopping an onion is, in that wider context, a piece of information about me rather than about the onion. I would rather know that than not. What has actually changed, I have come to think, is structural rather than spiritual. When the apps pick the dinner, an entire small daily decision-making muscle goes unused. When I pick the dinner — and walk to the shop, and chop the onion, and stand at the stove — that muscle is engaged for the better part of an hour. I had not realised, until I had reclaimed it, that I had been losing it. The cookbook lives by the kitchen now, where for the first month it lived on a high shelf, as if I had not yet decided. I am going to make something tonight. I am not particularly good at this. That is, after six months, the most I am prepared to claim.

I have, in the last six months, started cooking properly, which is a sentence that requires several immediate clarifications, the first of which is that the word 'properly' is doing more work than I am quite prepared to defend. I do not mean cooking as performance, of the soft-yellow-lighting variety. I mean cooking the way ordinary people in ordinary kitchens cooked for several centuries before the rest of us forgot how — three or four real meals a week, made from things bought intentionally rather than panic-purchased on the way home from work. I had not been doing this. I had been ordering. I had been ordering, in fact, in such a settled way that the apps on my phone had begun to predict my dinner before I had thought about it. The thing that pushed me into starting was unimpressive. My doctor mentioned my cholesterol in passing, my flatmate mentioned the cost of my deliveries in passing, and on the same week a friend gave me a cookbook that contained, in its first chapter, a single sentence I have thought about often since: 'You don't have to be good at this. You just have to do it twice a week.' I did the first dish on a Sunday — a tomato pasta whose tomatoes I scorched. It was edible. It was, in some narrow sense, dinner. I have, since then, cooked twice a week most weeks. The discoveries have not been the discoveries I had pictured. I had pictured a transformation. The actual changes are smaller. I notice what I have eaten, in a way that the apps had been preventing. I have made the same recipe enough times to know which of my own preferences matter and which I made up because the cookbook said to. I am not, I should be clear, a 'cook' yet. What I am is someone who, on the third Tuesday in a row, has bought an onion on the way home and chopped it without consulting an app. I should also flag, because the genre tends to skip it, that the version of cooking I am dipping into is quite specific — Western European, recipe-led, broadly middle-class. There are kitchens, in this city and elsewhere, where people have been doing this for generations on much less and with much more skill than I will ever have. The fact that I am writing several hundred words about chopping an onion is, in that wider context, a piece of information about me rather than about the onion. What has actually changed, I have come to think, is structural rather than spiritual. When the apps pick the dinner, an entire small daily decision-making muscle goes unused. When I pick the dinner — and walk to the shop, and chop the onion, and stand at the stove — that muscle is engaged for the better part of an hour. I had not realised, until I had reclaimed it, that I had been losing it. I should pause here, because I am about to make the kind of triumphant move that this genre rewards. The argument I have just made — that the apps have been atrophying a small daily muscle — is, I think, true. It is also self-serving, because it allows me to feel virtuous about an activity I have, after six months, only barely begun to do regularly. It also conveniently turns the failure of the previous decade (during which I was perfectly capable of cooking and chose not to) into the failure of the apps. The truth is that the apps offered me an exit and I took it. I should mark that, rather than pretend the apps were uniquely responsible. The cookbook lives by the kitchen now, where for the first month it lived on a high shelf, as if I had not yet decided. I am going to make something tonight. I am not particularly good at this, the version of me from a year ago would find the version writing this essay slightly absurd, and the version writing this essay finds the version from a year ago, in retrospect, a person who needed to start cooking. I am at the end of what I can usefully say.