Category: Sunday Salon

I would never consider myself an athletic person. I don’t enjoy watching or participating in sports, I hate to sweat, I get headaches when I exert myself. I’m not very coordinated, or graceful – my dad used to tease that I was the only person he knew who could fall up the stairs. (I had a peculiar way of stumbling over my own feet when I raced up the stairway.)

During my elementary school years, I counted myself extremely lucky to have exercise induced asthma which meant I was excused from gym classes throughout my entire school career! What an amazing gift for a chubby, shy, couch potato.

It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood I began to appreciate exercise. Moving my body, getting a little bit winded and shiny with sweat, feeling my heart start to pound and blood race through my veins really did give me a tiny bit of a “high.” Besides that, it helped keep me slim, and having once been decidedly “not slim,” I’ve always been a little bit paranoid about gaining weight.

Being an introvert through and through, I only liked to exercise alone. I had a library of VHS tapes: Jane Fonda, Kathy Smith, and my all time favorite, Leslie Sansone and her Walk at Home Program. I had such a collection I could workout everyday for a month in the privacy of my basement and never do the same routine twice. When the VHS machines wore out, I replaced everything with DVD’s and continued my walking, yoga, pilates, and strength training.

Of course there were times when the regimen was interrupted for varying lengths of time. Months – even years – when life in general was simply too hectic and I couldn’t muster the energy to trek downstairs for that 30-45 minutes.

That’s the thing about a routine – exercise or otherwise – it’s easy to fall out of the habit.

And then it’s difficult to get back in.

But for the past several years, I’ve been happily back in the basement at least three or four mornings every week, walking away the pounds with Leslie or doing yoga with Rodney Yee, or strength training with  Petra Kolber (I love her Scottish accent).

This past January my husband retired and one of the things he wanted to do was start a regular exercise program. So we joined Planet Fitness, conveniently located just a mile from our house. I started accompanying him to workouts, because I knew he was much more likely to keep it up if I kept it up with him. So for the past seven months, we’ve been attending quite religiously twice a week for an hour’s worth of strength training and cardio.

I’ll admit, I didn’t think he’d stick with it. He’s not much more athletically inclined than I am, although he did enjoy golf for a while back in the 1980’s. Lately though, working the gears on a six-speed transmission in his classic muscle car was about the most work he was interested in doing on a Sunday afternoon.

But like me, he got hooked on the feeling. Hooked on feeling better, to be more precise. On losing weight and having his clothes fit nicely. On having more energy. On knowing he was doing something good for himself.

Certainly there are days when either one or the other (or both) of us really doesn’t feel like going to the gym. We hem and haw and drag ourselves out the door. But once we get in and get started on our routines, I think our mojo starts working and we leave a little sweatier than we went in, but also with a clear head and a spring in our step.

In other words, (to paraphrase Dorothy Parker) we may not feel like exercising, but we love having exercised.

So what does all this have to do with art? Or Creative Living? Or “the intersection of art and life,” which is what these Sunday Salon posts are supposedly all about.

I think you know. It’s about discipline and habit and routine. It’s about getting yourself to the page or the keyboard or the easel or the sewing machine or the garden or the barre. It’s about making time and space for your art whatever it might be, and showing up when the time is right.

Even when you don’t really want to.

I’ve been proud of myself for my Planet Fitness attendance this year. I’m less proud of my dedication to any of my artistic endeavors. I’ve yet to develop the kind of discipline needed to carry through on self-imposed deadlines, and those are the only ones I currently have. It’s so much easier (and more fun) to go for picnics in the park with my husband, or catch a matinee in the afternoon. Curling up next to him on the couch with a book is lots more appealing to me these days than writing or revising or practicing piano.

My favorite at-home exercise guru, Leslie Sansone, has another piece of advice I think is as appropriate to creative work as it is to exercise. “You don’t have to spend an hour on your workout,” she says. “If you can only spend 15 minutes a day, then spend 15 minutes a day. Believe in the small doses! It all counts.”

Believe in the small doses. Perhaps that’s something I could apply to my creative living with some semblance of regularity. A small dose – 15 minutes a day? 15 minutes of free writing, or responding to a prompt. 15 minutes on one page of a Mozart Sonata.

More than likely, the 15 minutes would stretch into 20 or 30. My hands might get a little achy from holding the pen or running 16th note passages. My heart might race a little with excitement at finding just the right words or mastering the phrasing of a difficult passage. And no matter what the end result, I know I’d feel a sense of accomplishment for having written, for having played.

For having the discipline to Just Do It.

It all counts.

About the Author: Becca Rowan

Becca Rowan lives in Northville, Michigan with her husband. She is the author of Life in General, and Life Goes On, books of personal and inspirational essays about the ways women navigate the passage into midlife. She is also a musician, and performs as a pianist and as a member of Classical Bells, a professional handbell ensemble. These days if she’s not curled up on the couch reading with a cup of coffee (or glass of wine) close at hand, she just might be on the treadmill at Planet Fitness. She loves to connect with readers at her blog, or on Facebook, Twitter, or Goodreads.

There’s a song called The Room Where it Happened in the hit musical Hamilton, a song that describes the debate which occurred in the room where the Founding Father’s placed their signatures on The Declaration of Independence. Like many of the songs in that musical, it’s rousing and invigorating, bestowing a huge sense of importance on this particular place in time.

I suspect we all have significant rooms where things happen in our lives that serve as tipping points for our own personal history. A few weeks ago, I was able to return to one of those rooms for the first time in over 40 years.

The occasion was a final walkthrough of the building where I went to high school, a Catholic school for girls that recently announced it would be closing due to lack of enrollment after 75 years in the community. And though I didn’t love high school like I loved elementary school and junior high school, had not in fact ever been back inside my alma mater for anything since the day I graduated in 1974 (even though I live only a couple of miles away), I decided to pay my respects on this final day when the school was open to alumni one last time.

There was really only one room I wanted to see, and that was the music room. When I stepped inside, 45 years fell away and I was the tiny, shy sophomore walking into her first choir class, a room full of girls dressed in blue plaid skirts and saddle oxfords. I don’t recall feeling nervous, although I must have – I didn’t know anyone in the room, having transferred from public schools in another town. And I hadn’t sung in several years, choosing to play in the orchestra during my middle school years rather than sing in choir. (I do remember feeling horrified when the choir director – a little spitfire of a nun named Sister Alexis, who was also my French teacher – went down the rows voice testing us individually.)

A few days after that first day, something happened in that room that set my life on it’s course for the next 40 years. Sister Alexis asked if anyone played the piano. I raised my hand, along with three or four other girls. Each girl was called to the piano and asked to sight read the music on it. As they fumbled their way through, I became more and more nervous. What was this horribly difficult piece that no one could play?

When it was my turn, I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I say it was a simple version of Amazing Grace, which I played through without a problem. Sister looked at me, her dark bird-like eyes shining. “Can you play something else?” she asked. So I played Bach, a Two Part Invention. The class applauded.

I tell you this story not to be boastful, but to recall that simple action was a tipping point in my life. I became the official choir accompanist that day, a role I would play for choirs of all ages over the next 50 years. A role that has led me to some remarkable experiences, some remarkable friendships, some remarkable growth.

And for the first time since I left in 1974,  I was back in the room where it happened.

The room itself looked remarkably the same, rows of chairs lining the built-in risers, a bank of windows along the wall showing the long driveway leading up to the front of the building, the upright piano in the same place on the right of the podium. There were a few other women looking around the room, ranging in age from their early 20’s to over 70.  I heard one phrase repeated over and over again.

“I lived in this room!” a young woman exclaimed.

“So did I,” said the oldest among us.

“Me too,” I agreed.

My friends and I ate lunches here, often gathering around the piano as I played Carly Simon or selections from Jesus Christ Superstar. I had three classes every day in this room – Choir, Orchestra, Theory – and when I wasn’t in class was often practicing in one of the tiny practice rooms or gathering with other officers on the music department student board. I stole time during study periods to sit along the wall of windows and write letters to my boyfriend who was away at college. I sat in the hallway outside the room and comforted a friend who was crying because her parents were getting divorced. I rehearsed for hours with singers and instrumentalists, working our way through everything from the Messiah to Rodgers and Hammerstein.

I lived in that room.

I’ve lived in a lot of music rooms like that one during the past 45 years. So much happens in  rooms where art is created – living, working, dreaming, expressing emotion through music, sharing the joy of working together to make something beautiful for others to experience. Music touches something deep in our souls, helps us connect with our feelings and memories in a way nothing else can.

These are the rooms where life is lived on a special and significant level. May we all live in rooms where this happens.

About the Author: Becca Rowan

Becca Rowan lives in Northville, Michigan with her husband. She is the author of Life in General, and Life Goes On, collections of personal and inspirational essays about the ways women navigate the passage into midlife. She is also a musician, and performs as a pianist and as a member of Classical Bells, a professional handbell ensemble. If she’s not writing or playing music you’ll likely find her curled up on the couch reading with a cup of coffee (or glass of wine) close at hand. She loves to connect with readers at her blog, or on Facebook, Twitter, or Goodreads.