It’s been almost 2 months since I started the Ted Naiman workout plan.

It’s been even longer since I did any yoga.

That is, until over the weekend when I did the most “girls weekend” thing possible and signed up for a yoga class in a vineyard, complete with wine tasting. Yup. It happened.

I skipped the wine, but I loved doing yoga outside. The wind and getting dirt on my feet during some of the poses made me feel way more comfortable with my body and yoga in general.

Yoga is typically a workout that’s fine for me, but it can sometimes be frustrating to not execute a pose like it should be. Sometimes it’s flexibility, sometimes it’s strength, but as a yoga novice, rare is the time when I do a good yoga pose.

However, this summer I’ve been building muscle.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything, because I haven’t lost much fat and there are only so many push-ups I can do in a row.

Other time, I can see steady improvements.

Doing yoga is one of those times. Movements that used to be nearly impossible for me were suddenly doable. I didn’t have to cheat and modify poses. My muscles didn’t start shaking when I held a pose for slightly too long.

The biggest change I noticed was in my back. I’ve never consciously built up my back muscles before (in fact I avoided it because my back is weak and it hurt), but in my quest to do a pull-up I’ve been paying more attention.

Back muscles make it easier to do yoga.

So do shoulder muscles.

It’s very gratifying to get positive feedback in a functional way that these workouts are actually working. I’m building muscle, but most of all, I’m building strength.

That alone is worth it.

Not sure if I’ve talked about this before, but I’m on a #tinytravel weekend again. I love taking small roadtrips that become a mini-vacation. Take no time off work, or only a few days, drive somewhere interesting, and spend a few days exploring.

An unexpected side effect of this has been gains in my health status.

Before, when I was young, sad, and sick, travel always slayed me. Dehydration. Exhaustion. Tense worry. Uncertainty. Different food and water. They’d all stack up and become these unsurmountable things that would completely wreck my health. There was a time–I must have been about eight years old–when my parents had to get my physician to call in a prescription to prednisone to the nearest pharmacy to get me through the remainder of the vacation.

Anything that deviated from the routine was suspect.

Now, however, the word “antifragile” has entered my life. (Which I find somewhat funny because twelve-year-old me cosigns every single paragraph of the introduction.) Perhaps this is a byproduct of having read and digested many of Taleb’s writings. Perhaps it’s eating nothing but meat. Perhaps it’s mental maturity.

What has happened is this: every time I take a tiny trip, my body functions better than before. My digestion signals improve. My eczema starts to heal. I brace for the worst and somehow get the best.

This could just be that I’m distracted, that I have something to focus on besides myself. And that’s quite possibly true.

It could be that a variable schedule every once in a while actually helps shake things up.

Perhaps I have an expectation of and desire for good health, since I want to do and see all of the things that were the reason for the trip in the first place.

Whatever it is, I’ll take it.

I love that I have the freedom to travel and explore, and that I don’t have to worry that doing so will damage my health. It’s like I have my life back.

Sometimes, when you read a new author, it’s like meeting an old friend. A kindred spirit. I would have loved Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile just as much if I had read it at age 12 as I would have when I read it in my late 20s. Too bad it wasn’t around when I was 12 or I might have had a head start.

Other times, it’s plain weird how much a person that you thought you’d detest echoes a lot of your own ideas. For me, reading Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Yourself was one of those times. Because of my introduction to Louise Hay, I assumed she would be fully of crazy ideas.

Sometimes she is.

But much of her writing resonates with things that I already know, things that I have already thought or experienced or heard from people I trust. Definitely a value-add (not just another retreat of Think and Grow Rich), especially by tying in physical health.

Anyway, this is the bit that caught my attention.

You see, I believe that should is one of the most damaging words in our language. Every time we use should, we are, in effect, saying “wrong.” Either we are wrong or we were wrong or we are going to be wrong. I don’t think we need more wrongs in our life. We need to have more freedom of choice. I would like to take the word should and remove it from the vocabulary forever. I’d replace it with the word could. Could gives us choice, and we are never wrong.

Now. I disagree on her conclusions. We certainly can be wrong about things and it is in our best interest to Not Be Wrong about many things. Part of becoming wise is learning the right things to Be Wrong about.

(Louise fights dreadfully against the idea that there is absolute Truth in this universe, and that’s where we differ dramatically.)

We agree, however, on the word should. A while back, I wrote about why I think should is a dirty word.

Most of the shoulds in this world don’t have anything to do with bedrock Truth. They have to do with the part of reality that’s socially constructed.

• I should go to bed early.
• I should buy a house before I’m 30.
• I should go to the doctor when I’m sick.

You don’t have to do any of those things. You could live a perfectly happy life without them.

When dealing with the shoulds, you do have to consider the consequences of your actions. I like Louise’s suggestion of the world could in that situation.

• I could go to bed early. I could also go to bed late. It depends — when do I have to wake up tomorrow?
• I could buy a house before I’m 30. But what happens when I already have student debt?
• I could go to the doctor when I’m sick. I could also learn how to take control of my own health so that I get sick less often.

It’s a valid point. Switching from should to could places the choice squarely on my shoulders. I become the driver of the decision, rather than ceding control to whatever people or cultures built up the shoulds in my head.

It’s my job to filter my coulds through a moral and ethical framework, ideally one that I’ve deliberately considered and decided to take on.

I’ll be going through this book in more depth, filtering it through the Truth, to see how I can apply Louise’s ideas to my own life and healing. I’m optimistic.