I saw on Facebook that a good friend of mine who I typically admire was medically going through something that not only did I not envy but made me question my envy of him.
He was going through tests for his deteriorating health.
His posture might be forever wrecked. It sounds non-descript but when one considers how posture affects everything from sleeping to siting at a chair to eating or, in our case, working. It looks like Coder’s Disease, the sedentary condition that comes from 20 years of choosing Mountain Dew & Diet Coke to stay plugged into the Matrix instead of getting up, getting a glass of water & walking around. The few hundred extra calories a day and keeping the body in a fixed condition takes its toll as it did with my friend.
Sometimes I think my claustrophobic tendencies is my body just trying to keep healthy.
It starts with a leg shake, body shivers & going inane, then frustrations of being too afraid to leave the computer for fear of not making a deadline, then trips to the fridge for caffeine in any form because it’s faster than a walk the lake & back because a walk would take 90 minutes.
And the spiral continues…
…until the physical contempt for the confinement spills over into emotional contempt & when those two pillars of health fall, the mind protects the body and blames the work.
At least for me.
I can’t trick my body with even the best of music, binge sessions of Doctor Who, or live sports. Craft beer, iced Tea & whiskey, shutting off email…afterwhile nothing works. My body’s too afraid of the toll already placed on it since the Livemercial days added 70 lbs of career stress. Nothing’s that worth it.
Luckily…
Work binges and all-nighters don’t have the same appeal to me it used to. I say that knowing I stayed up till 5:30am resetting this blog (on WordPress at the time of this writing) after The Wolf ran a code cleaner on it. The excitement of multiple things working on it overwhelmed me.
Anyway…nobody remembers such badges of honor because entities continually dependent on such behavior typically don’t stay around long enough to properly hail and reward such heroism.
We even considered turning down a multi-site commerce project for health’s sake.
Bake & I had a pretty big ecommerce project that came four weeks before Project 03 was ready to handle the functionality. We hemmed and hawed & before approval we finally had to tell the client we couldn’t hit his desired deadline the level of work we expect from ourselves while maintaining out health. We did it last year for YouGossip and spent the rest of the winter worn out – mentally, physically, emotionally. I have no idea how Katie dealt with me – I’ll never fully understand the patience of Angels.
Luckily, the ecom client agreed without blinking an eye. We’ll take the blessing.
Lessons in planning & patience from Art of War & Tao Te Ching.
14 years later and I still keep a copy of Art of War in a backpack. The funny part is that it took me downloading a copy of it to my iPhone to reread it this year. Same goes Tao Te Ching. Art of War reminds me to consider the resources and abilities of everything in a situation and the area(s) of life for which the situations are contained. Tao Te Ching reminds me how to allocate those resources throughout the day so as to stay fresh & ready at all times and, hopefully, for the long haul.
& while I’m still carrying an extra 40 lbs.
It’s still only 40 lbs. It isn’t 220 lbs like my friend. And I think I’m continuing on the right path.
Speaking of paths…
Katie’s waiting for me down at her mama’s house to go check out some of the Fall outdoor activities of the North Chicago Suburbs.
Like the geese that kept me company, eventually it’s time to go because it’s the thing to do.
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