Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

recent posts

  • Worry less, joy more

    This is what 70 looks like on me.

    I’m in Stockholm with my genius partner Craig, who asked me what I wanted for my birthday while we were at the Royal Palace. I requested a box of chocolates, which we found conveniently in the Royal Palace gift shop.

    This is typical me, slightly disheveled, sweets on hand.

    When I started this blog many years ago, I titled it “Exquisite Now” because I wanted a reminder to be less of a procrastinator and more of a getting-things-done person. Being in the moment — whether it’s the beginning of something, the messy middle of something, the tail end of something, or just the drifting ordinariness of a rest between somethings — I wanted to know joy, not worry.

    Joy, I’ve learned, is just a thought away. Sometimes the gap to get there is large and sometimes it’s tiny. I hope, as I start my next decade, that I retain that thought for when it’s needed.

  • Failure first

    Meet the Brunkeberg Ridge Tunnel. Stockholm has a ridge running through it, thanks to ice age shenanigans. As the city grew up on either side of it, crossing it was a pain, especially in the age of power by horses. Then this genius entrepreneur talked the powers that be into letting him build a tunnel through it. Naturally the damn thing took a lot longer to build and cost way more than anyone expected. When it finally opened in 1886, nobody wanted to pay the toll required to use it. The builder couldn’t recoup his costs and went bankrupt. The city took it over and it’s still in use today, 139 years later.Check out the above link for a cool description of the tunnel’s construction, which involves the ingenious use of ice.

    We happened upon the tunnel and walked it this week. It’s weirdly fun, popular with bikers and walkers, another tool in a contemporary city that supports non-car infrastructure.

    Doesn’t it make you want to travel to the past and tell the guy who dreamed it up that time was his project’s friend?

  • Stability, agility

    Just wrapped up six days of hiking on the islands surrounding Stockholm. They weren’t tough days; we didn’t log more than 9 miles on any given day, but it’s a couple decades since I logged these kinds of miles several days in row. I’m thanking all of the Nia dance practice in the past year, which emphasizes, among many other things, flexibility, mobility, agility, strength and stability.

    Some days we were scrambling up rocky hills (to get to those amazing ocean views), and we’d be stepping up from one boulder to another, distances from 18 inches to 2 feet in a single stride. Going up required the agility. Going down called for stability.

    I so appreciate the dance training, and the fact that trainers actually ask us to think about these attributes that dance helps build.

    I bother to share this because I’ve never been anything special in the exercise realm. I’ve been a sedentary, ordinary person. Nia has helped me say “yes I can” to a whole range of things.