I Don't Know How To Do Anything Casually
By Leo thee Lemon
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I Don't Know How To Do Anything Casually
By Leo thee Lemon
Maybe the best way to describe balance is a teeter-totter.
Although honestly that also might be the worst possible way to describe balance.
How do you even write about balance without sounding like somebody selling incense beside a yoga studio?
Do I reference Yin Yang?
Do I talk about playground equipment?
Do I start pretending I walk tightropes over Niagara Falls in my spare time while pan flutes play softly in the background?
Maybe the best way is through how I’ve been discovering it myself.
Which is significantly less elegant.
My entire life has been me physically challenging myself.
Since childhood.
I always wanted to lift the heaviest rock.
Run the fastest.
Push harder.
Do more.
Compete constantly.
My uncle bought me boxing gloves when I was around five years old.
He wanted to teach me how to box.
Jab.
Jab.
Hook.
I was basically Muhammad Ali.
For approximately six seconds.
The first punch landed and I immediately ran crying to my mother.
The real lesson there was not about toughness.
It was that a five-year-old physically cannot keep his mouth shut after getting hit no matter how many times you explain this beforehand.
But wanting to become stronger never really left me.
No matter what I was doing, I wanted my body challenged.
I became very creative about it too.
Sometimes stupidly creative.
Now I’m over forty.
And honestly maintaining that level of intensity becomes exhausting after a while.
A few years ago I stopped focusing heavily on strength training and started focusing more on mobility.
More martial arts.
More functional movement.
More “please let my hips survive the winter” type goals.
The older I get the more I appreciate gentler exercise.
Or at least what I assumed was gentler exercise.
Tai chi and qigong look soft from the outside.
Slow movements.
Relaxed breathing.
Older people in parks moving their arms around peacefully while younger people walk past thinking:
“That looks easy.”
Then you actually do it properly.
Nobody tells you slowing movements down makes them harder.
Much harder.
Actually they say it all the time, but nobody listens.
Holding tension halfway through a movement while maintaining balance burns in a completely different way.
Tiny stabilizing muscles start screaming for mercy.
Muscles you didn’t even know existed suddenly introduce themselves aggressively.
I think tai chi trains all those strange in-between muscles bicep curls never touch.
I stopped caring about dumbbells around twenty-five.
I got heavily into kettlebells in my thirties.
At one point I was even a certified instructor.
Which sounds impressive until you realize the certification mostly confirms you enjoy voluntarily swinging heavy metal objects around repeatedly.
I was training toward Pavel Tsatsouline’s Simple and Sinister challenge.
One hundred one-handed kettlebell swings.
Ten Turkish get-ups.
All within fifteen minutes.
I could do it with a forty-kilogram kettlebell.
But the actual challenge required forty-eight kilograms.
Which is less “fitness” and more “having an argument with gravity.”
That was ten years ago though.
I’ve gotten rusty.
Or maybe wiser.
Hard to tell the difference anymore.
I was talking about getting tired with age.
So when I first started doing qigong and tai chi through YouTube videos, I genuinely thought it was easy.
I did that for about three years.
Then one day something clicked.
Suddenly every movement became dramatically harder.
Not externally.
Internally.
Now tai chi exhausts me.
Deeply.
It feels like I accidentally discovered some hidden muscle system buried underneath all the larger obvious muscles.
Like my nervous system finally stopped cheating.
Now in present day I mostly write.
A lot.
An unhealthy amount honestly.
I probably spend more time writing than anything else besides sleeping.
And I enjoy my six hours of sleep very much.
But I have the same problem with writing that I have with training.
I don’t know when to stop.
For the last two weeks I’ve been trying to casually ride my bike.
But I physically don’t know how to ride casually.
Every ride becomes:
Go faster.
Push harder.
Heavy breathing.
Burn the legs out.
Ignore moderation completely.
Ride for at least thirty minutes minimum because apparently my body interprets “exercise” as “minor combat situation.”
Then I’m physically drained for two days afterward.
I do the same thing with writing.
No I don’t become out of breath.
Although sometimes I get so focused I actually forget to breathe properly.
Which feels medically disrespectful toward my lungs.
I write until I get headaches.
I write until my eyes ache.
I write until replying to notifications feels physically impossible.
This is genuinely who I am.
I am this strange obsessive person who does not understand moderation naturally.
That’s not romantic.
It’s actually a real problem.
And yes I’m deeply passionate about writing.
I can write about Jesus.
Meditation.
Kettles.
Olives.
Fear.
Boxing.
Warm water.
There are genuinely no guardrails inside my mind anymore.
The same obsessive energy I once used trying to become physically stronger gets redirected into writing now.
Sometimes I get headaches that genuinely feel like my brain is pressing against the inside of my skull trying to escape.
Which I understand sounds dramatic.
But also accurate.
So what does this have to do with balance?
If we use the teeter-totter example, I think balance means knowing when to stop pushing.
The downward motion matters too.
Relaxing matters.
Breathing matters.
The moment where gravity carries you instead of effort carrying you.
Because life cannot only be strain.
It cannot only be productivity.
It cannot only be optimization.
Human beings are not industrial machinery despite modern culture trying very hard to turn us into emotionally exhausted forklifts with email addresses.
And Yin Yang gets misunderstood constantly too.
People think it just means opposites.
Light and dark.
Night and day.
Good and evil.
But it’s deeper than that.
There is no “and.”
It’s not Yin and Yang separately.
It’s Yin Yang together.
Interconnected.
One creates the conditions for the other.
One defines the other.
One cannot exist independently.
Without upward movement there is no downward movement.
Without tension there is no release.
Without effort rest becomes meaningless.
That’s why tai chi flows the way it does.
Pulling before pushing.
Shifting weight constantly.
Rebalancing continuously.
A tightrope walker stays calm for the same reason.
If he becomes rigid he falls.
Balance requires flexibility.
Not just physically.
Mentally too.
One step at a time.
One breath at a time.
I’ve actually become very peaceful while writing this.
Which I hope transferred through the words instead of sounding like a tired man having philosophical negotiations with his own nervous system at midnight.
So like the teeter-totter, maybe I need to rest sometimes.
Actually rest.
Not fake resting while mentally scrolling through seventeen unfinished thoughts simultaneously.
I practice meditation too.
Although not as consistently as prayer.
Usually prayer comes first.
But one day I may reverse that order and see what changes.
Prayer feels relational.
Spoken.
Directed outward.
Meditation feels opposite.
More like stillness.
Observation.
Quiet.
Alan Watts once described meditation as treating thoughts like background noise.
Don’t label them.
Don’t chase them.
Just let them exist like sounds in another room.
That approach works surprisingly well.
And honestly prayer and meditation feel complementary to me.
Not opposing.
Even if they appear opposite initially.
Thinking and non-thinking.
Movement and stillness.
Expression and silence.
Like shifting your balance carefully while walking a tightrope.
Only moving once you feel stable enough for the next step.
The teeter-totter and the tightrope walker are really describing the same thing.
Everything moves this way.
Everything breathes this way.
Animals and plants even mirror each other.
One breathing out what the other breathes in.
Both depending on each other completely while pretending they are separate systems.
Everything is connected.
Which sounds very profound until you realize it also means somewhere right now another person is probably aggressively researching kettles at 2 a.m. while questioning existence.
Although prayer and meditation both bring tranquility, they are different from each other.
Prayer is relational.
Meditation is awareness.
One speaks.
One listens.
And honestly maybe balance requires both.
Keep scrolling for the Afterthought.
The main articles stay free. That matters to me.
I don’t want the important stuff locked behind paywalls and “community access” that just means a credit card and a login.
But I do need a space to go deeper. Less polished. Less filtered. More honest.
So the main piece will always be free.
What’s below is optional.
An extra layer for people who want the behind-the-scenes thinking, the psychological undercurrents, and the parts that don’t fit cleanly in the public version without breaking it open completely.
Think of it as director’s commentary for the emotionally overcaffeinated.
