Category: Diary

The studio

My brothers have totally redone the band room…it’s like somebody’s
awesome basement now.

…which I suppose it is!

Gingerbread castle

I designed it, Mom made the gingerbread and baked it, I assembled all the walls, and Connor put the turrets together :)

Sam

My parents’ beautiful dog :)

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Categorized as Diary Tagged

Don’t run

I mentioned in my previous post that I’ve always had a problem properly pacing myself. Here’s a little story that illustrates that fact pretty well.

My first trip to Japan in 2001 was not a leisurely excursion. We were constantly on the move and we were always walking, whether it was to explore a certain area or just to get to our next destination.

In Kyoto, we spent a day wandering through the sprawling temples and shrines of Mt. Hiei. It was long day of hiking through the mountains.

Towards the end of the day we were headed back the way we came, so we could get to a trolley that would take us back down the mountain. We came to a temple at the foot of a long flight of wide stone stairs. I was feeling good. I’d made it through the long day and felt energetic enough to tackle those steps. And so I started briskly jogging up, to make the trip to the top shorter.

Our instructor Todd and my classmate Jason, both experienced hikers, immediately yelled at me, “No! Don’t run!” Startled, I slowed down as they explained: running up the stairs would take more energy than walking up them, and I’d wear myself out for the rest of the trip back.

I wasn’t sure I believed this was true. At least if I ran I could get it over with, and I might even enjoy it. Plodding up the stairs seemed like a neverending trial.

Still, I did as they suggested. It turned out that after that we had longer to go to the trolley than I’d thought. By the end of our hike my legs were only moving through the sheer force of my will. The trolley ride was but a brief respite, and soon we were trudging through the streets of Kyoto. When finally we stopped at a restaurant for a meal, I was so exhausted that all I could manage to eat was a bowl of white rice.

I wondered how it would have been if I had gone ahead and run the stairs. Would I have even made it to the trolley?

I realized even then that this story was a metaphor for life, but until yesterday I hadn’t applied it to my work. Now I see that I’ve been trying to run from 10 in the morning until 7 at night. Some days I’ve managed it. Some days I’ve stumbled. And some days I’ve been numb while I recovered. The end result? I’ve managed to excel at work, but pretty much everything else has fallen to the wayside.

I want to do more. I don’t want to pass out before I even get to the trolley.

I’ll just have to remember, when the urge to plow into a project consumes me, the lesson I learned on that historic mountain.

Don’t run.

Living life in the long term

I’ve done a lot of restructuring in my life in the past several days. Obviously, my blog template has changed. I’ve shifted from my dated, tables-based layout to a CSS layout with an external stylesheet and content elements pulled in via PHP. It’s a change I’ve wanted to make since 2004, and I’ll be documenting the process in a later post.

While I was at it, I went ahead and changed a few other things. I gave up on Google Reader, for one. I’d always felt like I should be using it, since so many others sing its praises, and awhile back I made the switch. However, I was never happy with the way Reader’s blogroll functionality worked. I shifted back primarily because that would allow me to use Bloglines’ nice, organized blogroll again. But then I actually went to view my feeds in Bloglines…and something amazing happened.

I started reading.

When that happened I realized that I hadn’t been reading for a very long time.

Oh, here and there I’d read a blog post in Google Reader. But mostly I’d skim the headlines and mark things as read to get them out of my sight. And I had stopped reading news completely.

Something about being in Bloglines again, seeing my feeds organized in the nice folders I’d made, gave me fresh energy. I felt comfortable, yet energized.

I read.

I read blogs. I read news. I looked at photos and paintings. I began to reconnect with my intellectual side. I’d felt vaguely that it had been absent, but up until I was actually absorbing and analyzing new information, I hadn’t fully comprehended the depths of my recent superficiality.

One apparent cause behind my slow slip into mindlessness was my choice to abandon my familiar tool, Bloglines. At work the next day, I suddenly recognized another cause.

I haven’t been pacing myself.

I’ve always had the problem of throwing myself 100% at whatever I’m doing, finishing up quickly and spectacularly. This works for some projects, like a piece of writing, or an infrequent chore. Applying this overenthusiasm to things like exercise and daily work does get a lot accomplished in the short term, but ultimately it leaves me tired, frustrated, burned out, trapped.

I realized that if I want to improve myself, I have to slow down and give myself the gifts of time and energy. I can’t leave work tired, brainless, unable to do much of anything besides zonk out in front of the TV. There’s no room in a life like that for my personal projects: reading, writing, photography, building ideas, getting healthy. There’s no enjoyment in a life like that.

I have to start looking at the things I need to accomplish, all of them, including work, in the long term. I have to step back and evaluate priorities, and string them out along a timeline in a reasonable manner–a manner that gives me some breathing room.

I’ve been reading more, writing more, and thinking more lately. I’ve also been happy. It’s not the euphoria that leads to a depressive crash, either. It’s a general sense of wellness, of purpose. It’s the desire to better myself, and the confidence that I can do it.

This is how I want to continue living.

I hate this

I’ve fallen out of all my good habits. It only took a couple of weeks to destroy several months’ work. I’m not exercising much at all and I’m eating crap. I feel like I’m stuck in a cycle of unhealthiness and depression. Whenever I try to start fresh, whether using Weight Watchers or something else, I find myself slipping up almost immediately.

I hate this.