Twelve small jobs

"So what is all this, then?"

You may find it odd that the text you are reading about an app or a service isn't written in the passive voice; and you'd be right, because projects always "get made" and services always "get offered" to people, don't they? They appear in front of you out of nowhere, as if they were chemical molecules that synthesise themselves in nature; and you pick them up and start using them. The individuals in these projects, the "Product Developer", the "Designer" or the "Software Engineer", have no face. Apart from the company's founder or its CEO, you hardly hear a single proper name. While a button, a theme or a text is being designed, you have no idea of the taste of bitter coffee in the mouth of the person producing that content, or of the unbelievable headache I'm having right now because of Covid (yes, people still catch Covid!). So that service or app gets reduced to a black-and-white choice, stripped of feeling and of anything personal: "Is it worth it, or not?" Which means that within a few minutes I will either lose you, and once you've closed this app I will never cross your mind again, or you'll stay with me to find out what these foxfulness exercises are: exercises that work even on someone like me, analytical to the core, whose body awareness only began to develop after thirty. You'll keep reading, and you'll come to understand why I, as an individual, needed this system, why I developed it, and why, on top of that, I felt the need to code it, turn it into a project and share it with people.

"So what are the Foxfulness exercises?"

In short, they are a series of exercises that get you to ask "What might life have meant by me?" and return you, slowly, to your factory settings, to your core. A system of 12 exercises that gathers under one roof everything I have read, listened to and watched since 2007 that did me good and pulled me up from the depths; everything I could point to and say "This is it!" Although I had done each exercise on and off over the years, it was only when I brought them all together that I noticed their effects growing, their "vitamins" reinforcing one another. Some I feel the need to do just once, when I get up in the morning; others several times a day. For example, my chill, that is, slowing down exercise, which helps me calm my worries and anxiety, is one I need to do over and over again.

I should say that I didn't design these exercises to turn myself into a perpetually smiling, docile, eternally peaceful sacred cow. Quite the opposite: I developed them to stoke the fire inside me that the web of the attention economy, wrapped around my whole being, had begun to put out; this was my last exit before the bridge to nihilism. At first, trying to keep up the water level in a cracked glass that I was trying to see as half full looked like a futile effort, but then I realised that unless I keep my glass full, there are hundreds of content creators, companies and people queueing up to fill that glass with all their toxicity! When I understood this, on a sudden impulse I wanted to snatch the glass away from in front of them. Not everyone liked that, of course; I think I had better save the details for the blog section of the website. In the end, every single exercise is trying to pull its own weight in the business of filling this glass.

"Fine, but what are they?"

I'll explain shortly how often to do the exercises, but almost all of them are things you already know. Some take only 5 seconds to do! I won't explain what each exercise is here, because when you go and tap on the exercises you'll see that each one already has its own explanation. But I want you to know this: the exercises fall into 2 groups: the Core exercises and the 4 Pillar exercises.

Core Exercises

These 8 exercises are the foundation of the foxfulness exercises, and they are fixed. They are made up of the practices, big and small, that have done me good over the years. Some of them simply reduce my anxiety and relax me. Others remind me of life's mortality and stop me taking personally the soulless questions of the unfeeling HR person in the job interview I've just walked into, or the silent, sour-faced response to a thank-you I offered a stranger. Some of them, such as Niente, that is, doing nothing, and 5 Senses, can even be done at the same time. Sitting on a bench, feeling the freedom of doing nothing and of not drowning in the obligation to be productive, I can at the same time take pleasure in the smell of freshly cut grass and the blue of the sky. Because if I can't appreciate this life, which I scraped my way into out of millions, born premature at six and a half months, then what is left to separate me from being a customer, a statistic, rather than a human being?

The 4 Pillar Exercises

As the name suggests, these four pillars are the things that make you you, that keep you standing, and that are yours alone. Remember: unless by coincidence we share the same pillars, when you start using the app it would make sense to think these over and, if necessary, change all four. My four pillars, the ones I can say "These are the things I've always wanted in my life!" about with all my heart, are: moving, meditating, reading books and writing things. Why I chose these is written inside the exercises, but in short the logic is this: concepts that put you into flow (see: flow theory), in which you can express yourself in a way that lets you say "This is me.", that leave you restless if you don't do them during the day, and through which you can, even if only around the edges, answer the question "What might life have meant by me?" I became sure of writing as a pillar exercise at 21, of moving and reading at around 25, and of meditation in my early thirties. In other words, they didn't just drop into my lap in ten minutes while I was sitting in a cafe. (If you can't find them, don't force it! Don't worry; the more you look, the more they come to you.) When I came up with the concept of the 4 Pillars a few years ago, these pillars were already in place inside me. The number of pillars could of course be 3 or 5, but my experience has shown me that squeezing them into the number 4 helps the concept of the pillar, and the habit of practising them, put down stronger roots.

"How often do I do these?"

For these to become a habit and start having an effect, and that's the whole logic of it, honestly takes a while. It's no different from growing a plant. If you keep the soil moist as best you can, something will start to sprout in it. Let me be honest: the days when I've done 12 out of 12, day after day, are far fewer than the days when I slipped here and there. Sometimes, when I couldn't read a book that day because of the workload, I at least open the page I was on, read one paragraph and close it. Sometimes, because I haven't even done the doing nothing exercise, I take deep breaths lying in bed and stare at the ceiling. My perfectionist nature is inclined not to accept these "low-quality" exercises, but in that moment I am there, doing my exercise, putting in some effort, however small. My conscience signs off on it. Of course, a run of low-quality exercises starts to grate on me after a while and I pull myself together with "Right, let me pay attention to this now.", but my aim becomes, as far as I manage it, not to miss something two days in a row. In short, the answer to the question "How often do I do these exercises?" seems to be in direct proportion to how much you want to take the reins of your life.

"Who are these exercises for?"

You know that the new currency of our day is the attention we have. Everyone is after a few seconds of our attention. If you've read the lines above and made it this far, then of course these exercises are for you. Clearly the foxfulness logic has clicked with you, you have the mental capacity and the patience to get this far, and it's obvious you want to change something.

Personally, I can comfortably answer the question "Who are these exercises for?" with "For me." I need these. I have become very, very tired of not being able to concentrate on two or three pages of a book, of my hand constantly reaching for the phone and for social media, of not being able to look at the same view for five breaths in a row, of constantly hunting for some source of pleasure, of running like a maniac from one project to the next, and of my life slipping through my fingers while all of this goes on. I need these exercises, I always will, and I will always keep going. Whether you know me or not, you can be sure that somewhere out there is a person staring blankly at the stars, or at a linden tree, as his daily exercise. In fact, you can even see the exercises I've done during the day in real time in the blog section of the website! But if we do these together, I'll be very happy, honestly! The choice is yours.