Cold Shower Journal Entry 1

To the meats of the matter:

I'm entirely grasping the longer haul dimension of this showering thing, at least I think I am. I'm seeing it as my daily promise to myself to 'JUST DO IT!', to alter my pathetic 'I can't do it' refrains and excuses to 'I don't want to do this, I don't like doing this but I want what comes beyond this and so I'm bloody well going to do it'.

I'm seeing it as my 'wake up splash' reminder on a daily basis that the quality of my life and what I achieve is UP TO ME and what I'm willing to do to achieve my goals.

I'm not the least bit used to these showers. Yet. Will I ever be?

Each day I dread the shower, and so now I've fixed to do it in the morning rather than procrastinate half the day or til bedtime as I did to begin with. I feel a sense of 'oh god bloody hell' just as I set the alarm for 5 mins 10 secs (apart from this morning when Lorna 'timed' for me and didn't look at clock so I was in there for nearer to ten mins and boy did it feel like nearly ten mins).

I scream my head off for a minute or two and move then into singing at the top of my voice songs like 'the hills are alive with the pain of freezing' and somehow I end up really laughing at myself. The first day my fingers went completely white afterwards and wouldn't return to normality for quite a while but since then my circulation has been fine. Generally what I do is move about plenty afterwards. This morning I took benji for a walk afterwards so a double win on that one cos he was more than happy with that idea.

The girls think I'm nuts and can't see the point, they won't listen to me so I can't be bothered to explain. They'll see soon enough in tiny ways the longer term results of the project. I'm seeing it as a kind of outside-in therapy - 'BCT'instead of CBT, also a form of shock therapy, and a mind-body unifying therapy and - also in a very weird way it's a homage to you, MrMiracle. Because I have an intuitive certainty in relation to the higher power of some of your choices and experiences, the truth of them, the grace implied by them, or followed by them; the creativity implicit in the very simplicity of this one determined commitment.

The 'world wide web' looks on with baited breath to see the results of this enlightening recovery experiment ;-)