A clean start

It’s the start of a new year and once again we make resolutions that we promise to keep. And as in most promises, we end up breaking them.

For my wife, who is a yoga teacher, it’s the time of the year when their studio is flooded with students. Like most of us, they are all too eager to do penance for the indulgence and gluttony during the holidays. Yet few of them become true fitness converts. They drop out of the program perhaps after posting a few selfies doing certain poses.

I had my share of holiday binges, not being strong enough to resist the hellish delights of  lechon, ham and beer at parties. Still, I’m not keen on joining my wife’s yoga class. It’s my lingering machismo, I know. I just can’t picture myself doing ‘downward dog’ behind women other than my wife. It’s just not my thing.

I plan instead to resurrect my old sneakers for morning jogs while I take the dogs out in the subdivision. Now that running is no longer the in-thing, I can go out and exercise and not worry so much that my shoes look like they would disintegrate with every step and that I don’t have  cool gadgets I can strap to my arm or waist so I would still look high tech though my way of getting fit belongs to the hunting-and-gathering era.

Or I can go back to biking this year. That’s better than running, actually. It’s less strenuous and enables you to go farther and thus enjoy more scenery in less time.

Better yet, I should just bike to work again. I can exercise as I commute. But last few times I did that, I came home with a flat tire. Having to bike from our place in Consolacion town to the university in Talamban is too punishing not just for me but for my bicycle.

Besides, I don’t think my wife and daughter would like the idea now that I have officially become the family driver.  So every day, I trail behind cyclists on our way to school and feel not just guilt (for my carbon footprint) but also envy. There is that almost juvenile sense of freedom one feels when bicycling past motor vehicles stuck in traffic jams.

The stress of commuting makes one wish we could just do our work at  home so we won’t have to leave at rush hours. We invest so much in furnishing our homes with an “entertainment center”,

Wi-Fi and books so we won’t have to go out to escape boredom. I add pets, a small garden, DIY tools and lots of art materials to make “bugging in” not only enjoyable but actually productive.

Our house doubles as a studio that I now share with my daughter. My daughter paints on the easel while I occupy the floor to do ceramic sculptures. There’s always a mess in the house. I collect all sorts of junk I can use for collage, sculpture and DIY projects. They accumulate like cholesterol in the arteries.

My wife accuses me of being a hoarder. But it’s hard to be a Zen minimalist when you live in a small house and you are an artist. And, in our case, there are now two artists in the family.

Paintings, framed photos, cutout pictures, travel memorabilia, and all sorts of ephemera crawl up the walls everywhere in the house making it look like a walk-in collage or mood board. I don’t really mind the visual overload or horror vacui. Picasso’s studio has the same mess all over. I even like looking at it in the photographs.

But my wife, true to form as yogi, hates the clutter and disagrees with me that it’s some form of organized chaos. She demands that we do general cleaning during the Christmas break.

Well, it’s been past New Year’s day and cleaning up has been mostly a tactical rather than a strategic operation. More work adds to our current obligations so it looks like it’s going to be a busy year. I can’t promise to tidy up unless, of course, I stop working. And that would be death for an artist.