Sensible adj. 1 having or showing good sense or judgement; a sensible decision.
We are surrounded, bombarded, subjected to ‘good advice’ that should enable us to be the most sensible lot of decision-makers the world has ever seen. The Government, for a start, provides us with recommendations and advice on virtually every aspect of our lives: what we should eat, how many hours we should work, how often we should exercise, what we should be doing with our childrens education and so on. On top of that, we are exposed to expert advice in all spheres of life; there are countless books, websites, programmes, information leaflets, presentations and professional advisors dispensing advice on how to do just about anything to allow us to make sensible choices and decisions.
Do we need all of this ‘helpful information’?
I have never really been a fan of sensible. I am not lacking in sense, in fact, quite a lot of my decisions are carefully considered and weighed up. However, there is – somewhere deep within my make up – a bit of an aversion to sensible. Don’t get me wrong, my life is not chaotic and wild – far from it – but, quite often, I’ll rebel against making ’sensible’ choices and won’t take advice, won’t follow best practice, won’t do what I am ’supposed’ to do because…..well, because I don’t feel like it.
So, what I was wondering is, if I stop doing ‘what I feel like’ and start making more careful decisions, planning and following some of the mountain of advice dispensed to us readily, what difference will it make to my life and the life of my family? So, herein starts the experiment. I will try to seek out ‘good advice’, apply it and see what difference it makes. Will life be more boring and oppresive (as I fear it could) if I do this? Or will I find that my quality of life improves? Perhaps the way that I do things now by gut instinct, most of the time, is better than following ‘best practice’, who knows. Is this going to be an endless round of researching, measuring and assessing rather than just living life or will I find that the problems presented by my more random methods will disappear?
What is ‘good advice’?
This is an interesting question and I am sure that I could probably employ an advisor to answer this question for me. The sort of sensible that I am going to be following is the advice that is freely dispensed to us from the Government, from well-known sources of supposedly learned people and advisors in the serious(ish) press. Although, I may change my mind, along the way, about what good advice does mean and who we can trust.
Becoming sensible, emminently sensible.
My intention is that my sensible behaviour will snowball and by Christmas I will be the epitome of a sensible citizen. This is a thought that, frankly, fills me with dread. But, here goes. So, what are my anti-sensible qualities or behaviours? As I say, I hardly live an ill-thought out, chaotic life but there are things I could be more sensible about. For example, I don’t save much, I don’t have a pension, I don’t have a regular exercise regime (although do from time to time), I don’t have a ‘day’ that I do things on like shopping or housework – it’s all very haphazard, I don’t monitor, measure, record or tend to keep much in the way of formal records (ok, I do keep accounts for my business but they are nearly always a bit behind), my library books are always overdue, I don’t stick to the government recommendations for alcohol and I always take on far too much – because I like the sense of panic and chaos that it brings. OK, so it’s not a rock n roll lifestyle – I am very moderately unsensible. How boring is that?!
Week one, change one (or so I thought….)
So, my first week is to follow the Government recommendations on exercise. A quick bit of research in the Guardian reveals that these are the latest guidelines:
· 30 minutes of moderate exercise a day is still the minimum, but vigorous as opposed to moderate activity should be “explicitly” recommended
· Combining days of moderate exercise with other days of vigorous exercise is better for you
· Moderate exercise should be in addition to daily activities such as casual walking, shopping or taking out the rubbish
· People should do two weight-training sessions a week
Ok, so to that end, my husband and I are heading to the gym tomorrow to meet with Nick, the gym instructor, one of the many experts that we will meet on this journey, to take his advice and get a new programme in place in order to meet with those guidelines.
However, we are busy people – we both work and have children to look after. So, a further step towards sensible behaviour ensued in order to do this; I put all of our family activities into a schedule, colour coded so that we could see where we both had time to include this new exercise regime into our routine.
One sensible act lead to another, in having our family schedule set out in front of me with all our various activities and appointments, I could see when I had time to cook a proper family meal and when I didn’t. This lead to me to creating a menu plan! And, more than that, it allowed me to take in some more advice: ensuring that the menu plan includes the recommended food groups in the right proportions. Well, actually, I had an amateurish stab at this without looking up the recommended amounts: lean meat, fish, some red meat (growing children need it, but not too much!) and lots of fruit and vegetables. OK, checking up that I have followed the latest recommendations is a task for another week but it was surprising how one ’sensible’ move led to several more.
What about spontaneity? What about fun? What about seeing what happens/going with it/flying by the seat of your pants because you can? Well, no more, not between now and Christmas. If I am going to understand those people who have always worn sensible shoes (as opposed to my high heels that led me to fall on the cobbles and lose the ability to walk for several weeks), I’m going to have to show some commitment to the cause.
I did toy with the idea of adding more to this new regime, but – come on – it’s only the first week.
