PERMA

I took my first Pilates class here yesterday. It was billed as a group equipment class (everyone on a Reformer), but with only two other students, it was nearly a private session. I liked it! The instructor, Dawn, was very nice and very encouraging, and I am starting to think that part of the training for becoming a Pilates instructor is that you must say "Nice!!!" every few minutes so that your students feel that they are actually managing to "draw your ribs together and up," etc.

Today's class was a mat class, and Dawn was the instructor again. This time there was a full house, which amounted to seven students. A number of the movements were quite difficult for me to attempt, let alone "master," so there is the potential for me to see a lot of change in my ability over time. Isn't that a sunny way of looking at it? After all, the Pilates claim is:

30 SESSIONS TO A BRAND NEW BODY

And I figure, between L.A. and here, I've had 7 Pilates sessions so far.

(Poetically impossible instruction of the day: "Bring your heart up and through your arms.")

Yesterday, after the very very nice, very lovely cleaning people had been in my house, I couldn't find Tuesday's New York Times. There is always a massive stack of old newspapers on the kitchen counter, and it seemed to be arranged differently after they were here, so I thought that the Tuesday paper must have gotten embedded in the stack. I started sifting through, unfolding every section to make sure the lost paper hadn't accidentally gotten itself hidden inside an older issue. While I had to be handling every section anyway, I decided to do my cursory flip-through, so that I could put them all in the recycle bag and get rid of the pile, for now.

I go through this time-shifted newspaper reading sporadically, but regularly (though that must be an oxymoron; I guess I mean "irregularly, but inevitably"). When some disastrous or otherwise huge event happens and you look at the newspaper from the day before with the knowledge of what is to come, it can be disorienting and often, to me, poignant. Just imagine looking at the front page of the paper from 9/10/01. Or the paper from the morning of 9/11/01, for that matter.

In this pile, there were no such premonitions of catastrophe, unless you count @repweiner's indignant denials. What a prince.

What caught my eye this time, though, was an article in the Science section from May 17 (not all that long ago) about "well-being," as opposed to "happiness," and a neat new acronym to consider, PERMA, for the "five crucial elements of well-being":

Positive emotion
Engagement (the feeling of being lost in a task)
Relationships
Meaning
Accomplishment

Since Oprah is all repeats now, I'd thought I'd throw that out for you to mull over.

I then Googled PERMA, one link led to another, and I found this, which is my final offering of the day, and which you may choose to stitch into a sampler:

I never did find Tuesday's paper.