Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Dr. Darrell White's Personal Blog

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Sunday musings 10/14/18

Sunday musings…

1) Feral. Abbie the Wonder Dog was feral for the first 6 or 9 months of her life. I can’t remember exactly. She was live-trapped and rehabilitated by a Border Collie rescue organization in north central Ohio. When she frustrates me it is always helpful to remember this.

Having a formerly feral creature living in our midst is also a very good counter to the frustrations of modern life. I try to remember how far I am from true privation whenever I find myself railing agains the insanity and inherent indifference that the world clearly has toward my existence.

A quick thought of my clever (read: sneaky) pup is usually all it takes to quell my urge to explode when I encounter the tragedy of a poor internet connection…while hurtling through a mountain pass in a car going 80 MPH.

2) Test. Some 10 years ago or so I proposed that a true measurement of health should be possible. Something that combined the most basic of classic medical knowledge (weight, %BW fat, BP, Cholesterol, etc.) and the breakthrough notion that physical fitness could be measured and tracked. My theory included the necessity of including some sort of measurement of “well-being”, a mandate that was initially openly mocked but seems to have been rather meekly accepted as both logical and necessary.

Creation and launch of such a value, call it “Total Health” or something along that line, has fizzled due to the lack of consensus–nay, even interest–in coming up with a way to measure Fitness. Imagine, in a place like CrossFit where the very definition of Fitness was created, no one save me and a tiny group of equal obsessives has so much as let fly a tiny trial balloon. The original owners of CrossFit LA were the first to use a standard entry test. 500M Row/40 Squats/30 Sit-Ups/20 Push-Ups/10 Pull-ups. I suggested pulling from both traditional sources (The President’s Fitness Test) as well as CrossFit and the larger endurance communities: 2:00 each of PU/Push-Up/Sit-Up/Squat, 1RM Deadlift, 1 mile Run. We ran a competition once called the “Fittest Eye Doc” using this.

What is necessary is a test that is a) doable by the general public, and b) capable of creating a single value that can be measured and tracked. Once that is done mathematicians and statisticians can be let loose with the various factors and given the task of coming up with a formula that includes all three categories. Why bring this here, again, when thus far my previous dozen or so postings have been met with crickets? With the pivot to health and the rapid build-up of a cadre of physicians who are at least superficially interested in using high intensity exercise for the purpose of increasing health, I am hopeful of a broader dialogue that comes to an agreement on a test.

Challenge: create a test of fitness that is broadly accessible in all ways (scalable) that can be included in a definition of health. 3-2-1…Go.

3) Volunteerism. Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of the Age of Volunteerism. While there exist tiny spaces where true volunteers live and thrive in a bilateral exchange of freely given goodwill, by and large volunteerism has been extinguished by its historical recipients. Today marks my last day ever of hospital ER call, the end of 2 years of receiving token payment for making my expertise available following 25 years of doing so for free. My experience is typical, as is this denouement.

Once upon a time all of your doctors were in private practice. We all had tiny little cottage businesses, did our work, and billed you or your insurance company for the work we did. Some of us worked in tiny little groups, but it was the rare doctor who was part of a large group or business whether in a big city or out in the country. Even the slickest Madison Avenue internist was basically a country doc, just with a better, more expensive wardrobe. In addition to having a greater familiarity with our patients we also enjoyed a very clubby relationship with all of the other doctors where we practiced. There was a collegiality, a sense that we were all in the struggle together. Folks who shirked their duties, foisting them off on other docs, were quickly educated about proper protocol or left alone.

Hospitals were different, too. Local or regional, they were hardly the gargantuan mega-businesses they’ve become. The org chart was shallow, and most local doctors were on a first name basis with the few administrators on the hospital payroll. You took call for the ER as a volunteer; the ER respected that you were donating your skill and your time and handled everything it could before calling you. Same thing for consultations. Your colleague only called you if they couldn’t figure out a problem or ran out beyond their scope of practice. There was a faint air of apology with each request, and a definite unspoken appreciation for the help that would be given. You helped because you were appreciated.

This is really no different from all manner of volunteerism in America. Smallish, closely knit organizations depending on the goodwill and generosity of members of their community pitching in to ensure success. Think local memorial 5K races, or CrossFit Games Regionals in the days before ESPN or the Home Depot Center. Countless small private schools that depended on the largesse and time offered by the families who sent their children there. You gladly accepted the opportunity to volunteer because you knew that without you the organization would not be able to function. You also knew that the recipient of your generosity not only appreciated your contribution, they really had no other options. Not only that, but if that organization somehow existed in your professional space you knew that it would never, not ever, abuse the trust necessary for volunteers to continue.

What happened? Money. Money and size and the distance that they create between an organization and its volunteers. Let’s go back to the hospital and the ER for a minute. Where once your efforts as a volunteer were deeply appreciated and those efforts rewarded with respect and care for your time and your expertise, the growth of employment of doctors by hospitals opened a gap between colleagues. No longer was there the esprit de corps, the shared notion that the primary target of our efforts was the patient was replaced by so very many doctors by the reality that they worked first for a business as faceless and uncaring as GM. Work that was once done by your colleague was now pushed to the volunteers whenever possible. Worse, boxes to be checked by the employed (to maximize revenue and minimize risk) meant demands made of volunteers, not requests. Worse, still, were discoveries that some “volunteers” were more equal than others: they were paid.

While this is nothing short of tragic in health care, it was inevitable once medical businesses were incentivized to grow ever larger. It is not confined to health care by any means. How do you think that volunteer at a Spartan Race feels when he learns how much his “team leader” is being paid? Have you ever “discovered” how much the Executive VP of your favorite professional organization is paid? As a people we Americans are generous to a fault. That generosity usually continues right up until we discover that we have been duped, and even worse that we have been purposely duped by the people who run the organizations for which we volunteer.

And so we gather here to mourn the passing of the Age of Volunteerism. Like so many things of wonder and goodness there remain pockets of resistance, little oases where the goodwill, honesty, and appreciation beget the kind of ebb and flow that made things so much better, kinder, more collegial at the apex of Volunteerism. My friend Tom Gardner was just named the president of the Society of Alumni of our Alma Mater. Tom has given tirelessly of his “spaces”, his timespace, brainspace and emotionalspace to help shepherd tiny Williams College as it flows on though time. Is this truly different? A tiny refuge from the Zombie Apocalypse of corporatization of all things to which we once volunteered?

We can only hope. Hope that Tom and those like him who continue to find places and causes where their volunteerism is met with what we in medicine have had to bid farewell. We can only hope that there will be places where being a volunteer means receiving the respect and appreciation and even a kind of love in return for what we have given. We can only hope that there will continue to be places where the incessant drive to grow ever bigger, size measured on a spreadsheet rather than by heart, will be resisted. For if it can happen in medicine, if volunteerism can be killed in what is arguably the most noble of all endeavors, I fear that it is doomed everywhere.

And so we mourn the end of the Age of Volunteerism. We wait with equal parts sadness and fear for arrival of what follows.

I’ll see you next week…

–bingo

 

Sunday musings 8/5/18

Sunday musings…

1) Babies 2. Not gonna lie, still on a huge high from babies on the beach for the first time in 15 years. To top it off our last ‘baby” Ryan visited for a couple of days as he prepares for his senior year in high school.

All 6’5″ of him!

2) Highway. At the moment we are steaming along I-90 headed west to Casa Blanco, Beth at the helm. It never gets old, that feeling of awe that I can be connected to you all while I speed through the countryside of Western NY. I think this cellphone/internet thing is gonna make it, ya know?

This trip is often filled with hours of debriefing the events of extended White family’s week together crammed in our rented house on Cape Cod. Not this year, though. Nothing but a quiet, warm feeling as we work through the math necessary to accommodate what is likely to be a bigger crew next year as word gets out about how much fun we had.

3) Games.  This is the first year that CrossFit, Inc. has included sessions and events targeted specifically toward physicians who do CrossFit. It’s a good idea, albeit one that is rather late to the gate given Coach Glassman’s interest in the intersection of fitness and health. Still, better late than never. One of the best parts of the enterprise is the involvement of Dr. Julie Foucher. Waiting until now means that she is available to participate in the growth of the CrossFit MD movement as she, herself, grows as a physician.

Occasionally I stumble upon a post in the CF MD page on FB. Without meaning to offend, CF is so new to the majority of the MD’s participating that the space looks less like a collection of docs and more like some of the threads we all used to participate in back in the days of CrossFit.com v1.o and 2.0. This is not surprising, nor is it a knock on my medical colleagues. CF is exhilarating in the early stages; the newness of CF is the same for every new adherent. I feel like I am re-reading some of the best threads on the CrossFit Forum ca. 2010 or so.

Which makes me wonder: wouldn’t it be possible to accelerate the indoc (see what I did there?) if either the MDL1 course or the prep work included a review of some of those classic Forum threads? Think Eugene Allen on programming or Larry Lindenman on planned/cycled recovery. Robb Wolfe on Zone/Paleo nutrition. I remember one on scaling the load in a WOD based on your CrossFit Total (back for the first time since the very first Games in Aromas) rather than sex, height, or weight. Pretty sophisticated analyses from some of the OGs we no longer see anywhere around CF, but relevant and on point today as much as they were back in the day. You could accelerate the impact of having doctors engaged in functional fitness by leapfrogging them through the stages of self-discovery.

My take: make healthcare more like fitness rather than making fitness more like healthcare.

4) Reunion. Our return to Ohio is a day or two later than usual because we attended the 40th Reunion of one of my high schools (I moved after freshman year). Not a typo. 40 years. Doesn’t seem like yesterday; more like last week! One funny quirk: we all referred to each other as “kids”, as in “who’s that kid over there in the green shirt?” Every one of us did it. Attending was easy since it was my turn to bring my Mom home from the Cape and she still lives in the house I grew up in.

So? How was it? Was the Reunion a meaningful milepost? An event that will in some way alter the trajectory of any of us who attended? Probably not, but then again, is any Reunion really supposed to do that? No, what happened was a group of really nice people, many of whom still live in or around town, got together and spent a few hours being genuinely nice to one another. Oh sure, Tim (our Valedictorian) made fun of my senior picture outfit (definitely deserved), and some of the goofy stuff we wrote in each other’s yearbooks got a re-reading, but all in all everyone was quite gentle with one another. Heck, we could have spent all night ragging on me after Jane pulled out a pic I signed, but she was too kind to let it go down that way (for which I will be forever grateful!).

Heck, I’ll bet Dianne only got positive responses when she got folks to play the “who has changed the most” game (I wimped out and didn’t play).

No, Reunions are for remembering as many smiles as possible from days gone by, and for enjoying whatever threads there may be that tie us together, still. There were some crazy “it’s a small world” connections that were just a hoot to discover (like the Needham connection, right Lori?!) It was fun, and flattering as hell, to discover that some of my classmates have discovered my ramblings here and elsewhere and liked them. For the record they all seem to agree that Beth is AT LEAST my Better 95%! Tim and Tom came from California to RI and got trumped by Yukio who surprised us from Tokyo. That’s just cool. No revelations, no epiphanies, just a few hours to remember that we were privileged to have known each other in whatever small way, then and now.

I had so much more fun than I expected to, from the first hugs (thanks Kit, Jackie, and Sue) to the last handshake (great party Steve), I’m so very happy to have been a part. Think “yes” the next time you get an invitation.

I’ll see you next week…

–bingo

Time Affluent

Time is the most valuable commodity. For each individual it is a finite item. Precisely 24 hours in each day, thank you very much, at least a couple of which you must spend sleeping. It has been called the ultimate luxury, spawning a new class of individuals for people to be jealous of: the time affluent.

It seems that there are two diametrically opposed camps when it comes to time. There are those who feel that the proper approach to the finite nature of time is efficiency; one must develop the ability to utilize each waking moment to its fullest, most productive limits. This group includes both multi-tasckers who try to do lots of things simultaneously, and power workers who have preternatural powers of concentration and just motor through one task after another. For the record, bosses love this kind of producer, right up until they crash that is.

On the other side of the coin is a group that cherishes the freedom that unassigned time provides. Time, that is, in which one can choose to be “productive” in a way that can be measured (e.g. practice bending notes on a harmonica) or not (play along to Wammer Jammer). Knowing the difference between the two is the first step toward this type of freedom. I have professional friends who simply can’t get enough of our particular medical specialty. They work all week, every week, and in their “free time” they attend conferences at which our specialties nuances and science are discussed and debated. Some of them are very serious about all of it. They have each day mapped out to the minute and race from one session to another. They are productive. Others approach it differently; they are exploring.

Each of us has that same 24 hours each day, and we all have some version of the same things that must be accomplished over the course of those hours. The aforementioned sleep, eat, earn a living…almost all of us have this going on. One can choose to “invest” in time, though. If someone else mows your lawn that frees you up to go to the gym, for example. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, stuff like that can be offloaded or batched so that extra aliquots of time are available for other stuff. This is what it means to be “time affluent”. There are choices that can be made, sacrifices in one area that gives you more time in another.

As is my wont I will offer an example from life Chez bingo. Many of my close professional friends spent last weekend in the mountains of Utah at a conference. All of the stuff that I like to do and all of the colleagues I like to hang out with were there. Me? Stayed home. The lake was flat and the Man Cub was available to hang out. Going to the conference would undoubtedly have brought me consulting and writing gigs, but I have more of those than I have minutes to spend with a water-loving 2yo. A really interesting business opportunity is circling my day job, looking for a place to land in my schedule. Frankly, it’s great business. But it will take time. Time that I have gotten accustomed to using in other ways.

While I have more freedom than most I am not “time affluent” enough to walk away from that joint venture; Monday morning will find me in meetings about how to make it fly. It’s actually interesting and intellectually engaging enough that I might have done the same thing even if I didn’t have such a compelling business prerogative involved. Still, the thought did cross my mind that maybe, in the end, I was actually better off letting it pass me by in favor of owning those minutes that will now be jointly owned by our venture.

Like money, no matter who much you have, someone always has more free time than you do.

 

 

Fitness or Sport? A Proper Place For High Intensity Training

The CrossFit Games Regionals were on ESPN yesterday afternoon. What? Wait. No? No, I guess you’re right. It wasn’t ESPN, was it. As it turns out the Games have shifted over to CBS Sports. Totally missed that memo. Of course, I only surf to the Games site once or twice a week anymore so I can be forgiven. Thankfully I was marooned at home with nothing left on either my Honey-Do list or my own Wish List, and ESPNU was all kinds of messed up so I couldn’t watch the D1 Lacrosse quarterfinals. Surfboring around cable I stumbled on the Regionals and received my annual reminder about what CrossFit is and who is supposed to do it.

In short the CrossFit Games as exhibited in this year’s Regionals is to CrossFit as the Indy 500 is to your daily commute: almost everyone needs to do the latter, but almost no one can, or should, do the former.

You could certainly say that I am treading on thin ice by proclaiming that you and I have no business doing anything but gawking at Regionals athletes doing full-on Regionals WODs here on .com. Fine. Here is why I feel this way; the incessant urge to emulate Games-level athletes and to turn every CrossFit WOD into a training session for competition risks the undoing of what makes CrossFit (and other high-intensity offshoots) a potential solution (or integral part of an irreducible Rx, to coin a phrase) in solving the population health problem in Western societies. It really could be as easy as eating fewer processed carbohydrates, being stronger, and training at relatively high intensity for periods of time in the 8-20:00 range. Stronger and leaner with greater aerobic capacity is all pretty much any of us needs.

Everyone who has ever owned a Box or coached a CrossFit class has seen the danger of extending the “you vs. you” competition outward into the “Sport of Fitness (TM)”. Clients who leave a gym because the trainer refuses to teach them how to do a CTB butterfly PU when they can barely do a single dead hang PU. Fledgling CrossFitters who insist on rebounding box jumps instead of stepping down because their times suffer when they do. “Linda” or “Diane” done As Rx’d with rounded lower backs, chins held high because, you know, you gotta Rx the Open WODs if you want to go to the Games. It’s really hard to exaggerate how disheartening it is to listen to a client say they are leaving a gym because they don’t feel like you are the best fit for them. Then you look at their data and discover that they are down 15% BW fat, have doubled their 1RM Deadlift, can now do “Fran” Rx’d in half the time they first did it with an empty bar and a green band, all injury-free.

Form, then consistency, then and only then intensity. This is what you need for fitness. The siren song of competition is strong, especially during our Games season. Shout out to those trainers, both within the CrossFit business universe and out, who continue to hue to this orthodoxy. Functional movements, irreducible exercises performed properly at a level of intensity that is high for an individual, coupled with a diet that is designed to fuel performance in the gym and in life is what we 99.9%’ers need. Distilling this prescription into a measurable and repeatable program is the essential genius of CrossFit. That some of us get to do it as part of a community is that much better; friendships formed through shared experiences, especially shared strife (and what is “Fran” if not shared strife), are also an integral part of being healthy.

After my (ca. 2006) WOD I sat down with some left-over steak and a handful of nuts to see how Dani Horan was doing in the East. A little sore and energized, the only thing that was missing was another CrossFitter there to join me in watching the spectacle.

Remembering My Gama*

Admit it, you cried too. You found yourself in front of the TV for whatever reason at noon on April 21, 2018 and watched the Bush family say goodbye to their matriarch. My Mom turned 81 on April 21st, and quite frankly I am not ready to think of her being gone. Not even a little bit. So I watched the grandchildren. Rather than putting myself in the minds of Mrs. Bush’s children I channeled her grandchildren. Listening to Jeb Bush describe “Ganny” sent me back in time to the days when I was the best-loved grandson in the history of all mankind.

My birthday is January 7th, 1960. Gama was “born” about a year later–I couldn’t get my one year old tongue around the word “grandma” and it came out “Gahmmah”. Now, the White family is really big on precedent, and since grandchild number 1 called Mom’s mother Gama, Gama it was for everybody. Subsequent grandchildren, great-grandchildren, friends, neighbors, heck a few Romans who lent an ear for all I know, called Jane Knopf “Gama”. (This precedent thing turned out to be not so good in the next generation when my nephew, grandchild number three, called my parents “Bam” and “Bamp” and it wasn’t allowed to stick, but that’s another story.)

As the first grandchild in my Mom’s family I had the perfect set-up, and the fact that I was the first male in a generation didn’t hurt one bit. My brother was born 17 months after I was, and with the two of us so close together it was apparently a burden for my folks. Turned out to be quite a break for me, though, because my brother was born in May; at the end of June I was shipped out to stay with Gamma and Gramp at the Jersey Shore, the first of countless solo visits with my grandparents. Thus began a most privileged relationship with my maternal grandparents, especially with my beloved Gama.

It’s hard to describe, especially in these days of ultra mobility where extended families live apart, how critical it was to be loved by a family member without condition. Accepted and supported with no strings attached. Time spent with Gama was time spent in a guilt-free bubble. You behaved because it just felt so good to be in that bubble, and if you misbehaved forgiveness came in waves a very brief instant after any punishment. I visited my grandparents for weeks at a time, especially in the summer. My aunt Barbie, 16 years my senior, made it OK for the rugrat to be around even though I was clearly messing up her “only child” status in the house. Those were good times. I had a very special and unique relationship with Gama and Gramp. If I close my eyes and it’s very quiet I can still hear them…”Dar”.

Apparently everyone in my family saw what a special relationship I had with them and sought to preserve and protect it. It does no good to share any family secrets, but every family has some, eh? I was the last to discover any of the family’s darker secrets, long after my siblings, long after the cousins 10 and 12 years my junior. I was 30 when my aunts visited us in New York at the end of my residency years when I became aware of how much I’d been “protected” over the years, protection so effective that any present day revelations cannot dim or diminish the memories of my life with Gama and Gramp.

We lost Gramp when I was around 17  when he succumbed to his nth heart attack. That whole time is really just a blur, from the phone call I took in Rhode Island with the news from my uncle to the memorial service in Miami where I stood next to Barbie as she tried to read her farewells. What I remember–indeed all I really remember clearly–is Gama saying over and over, “I didn’t get to say ‘goodbye’.” I didn’t get to say ‘goodbye’ either. Maybe that’s why I can still hear Gramp every now and again…”Dar.”

Gama stayed in Florida at King’s Creek for a couple more years, living in the same apartment I’d visited so many times. I even made one last solo visit when I brought my new college buddy “Kid” for a week of spring break fun during freshman year. Every family seems to have one adult who’s cool, don’t they? Yours does. Admit it. There’s a parent or an uncle or a grandmother who’s just cooler than all of the other adults, right? Well, in our family it was Gama. My Gama was cool! As the years went by as more and more of our friends got to know her it seemed she just got cooler. Just ask Kid.

It turns our that Gama was ALWAYS cool. She entered college as a pre-med student in the days when women did not become doctors. Almost got away with it, too, until her mother found out and transferred her into education. She dated the gay boys when she was younger because they took her to the best clubs and they were the best dancers (and she didn’t have to worry about getting pawed on the train home from New York).  Yup, Gamma was cool.

After a few solo years in Miami Gama moved in with my folks in Rhode Island, spending several months each year with my aunts and their kids in Florida. She never called us just by name, it was alway “MY Dar”, my Ran, my Tracey, my Kerstin. My Jenny, Rick, Mike or Ed. All eight grandchildren now clearly had a unique and special relationship with Gama since she was now living with all of us. She was still my biggest fan, my brother Randy’s defender (Ran was the “black sheep” by choice when we were younger), Tracey’s cheerleader and Kerstin’s confidant. Even though I can’t describe them as well I know that each of my Florida cousins had some version of that same specialness.

Some time ago, I was in my early thirties, Gama fell and broke her hip. Word came from the hospital that she was failing–a broken hip is often the end for older women. Beth called me on the way to the OR to do cataract surgeries. Numb, stunned, I couldn’t think. I did what we have always done in my family, I went to work. It was Beth who knew better, who cancelled my patients and put me on a plane to Miami. Beth who let everyone know that I was on the way, alerting everyone in Florida when I was delayed in Greensborogh so that Barbie knew where to to leave the message. I sat sobbing in the airport after the  gate attendant told me Gama had died. I wouldn’t get to say goodbye.

My Mom and I spoke at the memorial service representing the children and grandchildren, Mom all icy control, me crashing, burning and choking my way through. I told one of my favorite stories, the one about the little girl who was standing in front of her grandfather’s casket, stomping her feet, clearly angry. “He can’t be dead. I wasn’t done with him yet!” That’s how I felt when Gramp died. I think if we’d had the chance to ask him Gramp would have told us that he wasn’t really all that done with US when he died, either. I definitely wasn’t done with Gama, either, but Gama was done with us. She was ready to go, so long after Gramp left, so long living alone among all of her special grandkids. I said then, and I still wish to this very day, that she hadn’t been in so much of a hurry. I would very much have liked to say goodbye.

Maybe that’s why even now, when it’s very quiet, if I close my eyes, I can still hear her…”Dar.”

 

*In our family there is some question about the proper spelling. Since she signed all of her cards and gifts “Gama” I’m going with that.

Sunday musings 12/17/17

Sunday mornings are quiet mornings at Casa Blanco. Re-rack after feeding the dogs, catch up with newspapers that have piled up in addition to the Sunday papers, a third cup of coffee just for the linger. Over the course of a week I collect thoughts and ideas for either musings or an eventual longer piece here, but as often as not it’s something that I read over coffee that turns up in my little Sunday piece. One fertile hunting ground is The Ethicist in the Sunday NYT Magazine, and it is here that I found my muse this week.

I have offered, here and elsewhere, that it is perfectly proper to make an enemy as long as you do it with forethought, and do it on purpose. In my long-held opinion to make an enemy by accident is the second greatest insult one can extend to another human being; it suggests that the newly formed enemy was not even significant enough to consider that they existed prior to your actions (or inactions). This leads, of course, to the single greatest insult that you could ever foment: to actively and purposely choose indifference to the existence of another.

This is a part of a topic addressed by The Ethicist on Sunday. He defines a “decent person” in part by whether or not they have what philosophers call appropriate “reactive attitudes”. In short how we react to others, and by extension how we react to what others in turn display toward us. The philosopher Peter F. Strawson mentions resentment, gratitude, and anger that we may have in response to how we perceive that others have treated us, or treated someone who we care about. Simply feeling these emotional reactions acknowledges that we feel the others are a part of our lives. They exist. They matter.

This time of year is fraught with the entire spectrum of emotions as we come into close contact with family and others with whom we have history. The simple fact that we come together means that we are not, cannot be, indifferent to either them or their feelings about us. Now to be sure there are some among us who have family members who are truly disturbed and either cannot or will not extend any type of goodwill or positive emotion whatsoever. Those, I believe, are rare exceptions, and to you who may be in this position you have my deepest, heartfelt sympathy. For the rest of us, though, in North America the Holiday season presents us an opportunity to re-boot our “reactive attitudes” toward family and friends.

Do you remember what it felt like to go home those first couple of years after you got out of high school? Remember how excited you were to see your folks, your grandparents, and your siblings? There was a buzz in your circle of friends as you conspired to sneak away and re-convene right where you left off the last time you were together. Remember? Trust me, the feeling was at least mutual (if not even stronger) on the part of your parents (and grandparents).

Families are complex and messy, but for all of that no matter what your particular story may be families are never indifferent. You could certainly take the position that we should always be connecting with family, and that the pressure of the Holidays would be lessened if we made more of an effort to be with those who trigger our “reactive attitudes” throughout the year. I’m OK with that. Actually, as a son, brother, in-law, father and grandfather I’d be thrilled with that. But here we are during Hanukkah, with Christmas a week away, so how much we see folks over the year is a topic for another Sunday.

Today, it’s time to go home.

 

In Fitness Tracker Recovery

Hi. My name’s Darrell and I buy activity trackers.

Like most everyone else, I’m sure, it started off innocently enough. For me it was the Nike Fuel Band. Man…was that fun! Looking back it really didn’t do all that much to be honest. As far as I can tell all it really did was tell me how many steps I did, and maybe there was some other kind of movement it tracked. Heck, Nike made all kinds of a big deal out of the “social aspect” of the Fuel Band. How I could follow groups and compete to see who got how much Fuel and I never even did any of that.

It was the fireworks that got me, I think. When you made your Fuel goal, whatever that even meant, your band erupted into fireworks.

Thinking back that might have been enough. A Fuel Band, daily fireworks, and I might have stopped right there. Ah, but as is so often the case when you are an early adopter, my Fuel Band was not really a ready for prime time grown up product. It broke less than a year after I put it on for the first time. But me? I was hooked. I imagined all kinds of cool stuff you could do with a REAL tracker. A tracker that could measure something real and meaningful like…wait for it…WORK. I’m a CrossFitter after all. WCABTMD is my ultimate goal. Of course I’d want to track my work done.

So began my quest. The research wasn’t quite as in depth, my dive not as deep as my initial jump into CrossFit so long ago. Imagine how long it took to get through a few pages of CrossFit.com or the original CrossFitKids.com with a dial-up or early stage cable modem. No, this was a high speed/high churn journey. Next up was a Garmin Vivofit which taught me that I should care about sleep. Not just sleep of course, but the measurement of my sleep. Who knew? Years ago I’d researched sleep and I knew I should be getting some multiple of 90 minutes (cycles) each night, but now I could measure that, too.

Naturally the VivoFit was inadequate: no points for a PU. So, too, the Jawbone Up came up short. I gave some thought to the Athos wearable garment sensors, but my craving for measurements wasn’t deep enough to prompt me to buy something that only told me when and to what degree a particular muscle group was firing (although it would have been a cool way to dial in my deadlift and squat technique).

Over time it became clear that the entire fitness tracking industry was just one big shill for the endurance community. All of them were dedicated to measuring your aerobic activity. Period. [Note to Coach Glassman, and everyone in the functional fitness community: if you want growth in your part of the fitness world get a viable tracker of work capacity on the Apple Watch] I had great hopes for the Mio Slice and the BioStrap because you could dial in specific exercises and get activity credit when you did them, not just when you were running, biking, or rowing. Alas, although they were light years ahead of my beloved little Fuel Band they, too, were not ready for prime time. It was comical to see what they decided I was doing when I exercised.

Although my disappointment was painful I was in too deep to just give up. Surely, science would step in with something more meaningful than how many steps I got each day. Enter Heart Rate Variability as a proxy for autonomic nervous system health, ergo fitness. Could this be it? My BioStrap was now matched against both a Zoom HRV and a program on my phone that used the camera to measure HRV. The science was great.

The data was meaningless.

Now desperate I turned off everything except my alarm clock and my cheap little $15 Casio with a stopwatch. Yes, you read that right: I went cold turkey. I hit the pillow and woke up without any kind of measure other than “did you sleep well, dear?” from my wife Beth. 3-2-1-Go, start the stopwatch on my cheapo watch and go as fast and as hard as I could. Sweat angels instead of rushing to check my numbers. No plugging my results into Strava or Beyond the Whiteboard or anything else. It was hard. I couldn’t tell whether the shakes were from the WOD or from trying not to reach for my BioStrap and my phone.

But I made it through. I did give a thought to buying an iPhone when I saw it could do a one-lead EKG (an EKG on your wrist!), but I managed to resist. Recovery is hard, especially if you can’t watch your heart rate go down. No, no, no, I meant it’s hard to not want to put on one of my trackers. You know, just to check. The urge is getting weaker each time I go to the gym now, so I think I’m in the clear. It’ll be tough if something comes out that can really tell me what work I’ve done, what the area is under my curve, but I guess I’ll have to deal with that if it ever actually happens. For now I am free of activity trackers of any and all kinds.

Although I really do miss those Fuel Band fireworks.

When We Will Exclaim a Person of Substance

My life is centered around, and centered by, the myriad women with whom I share airspace. There are certainly men there, too, and I am certainly fortunate in that my immediate world does not include anything like what other folks would consider a boss. While most of the women in my daily professional life are either employed by me directly, or employed by someone who has in some way contracted to assist me, the reality of my daily existence is that I have a symbiotic relationship with teammates who happen to be women, and we depend on one another every waking moment.

Because of this I have become alert to all kinds of slights leveled at women in general, and women who work in healthcare in particular. Frankly my worldview is really pretty restricted when it comes to the workplace, especially since the family Box closed a couple of years ago. In healthcare the hierarchy/patriarchy has historical sheltered bad behavior directed at women from both view and recourse. Is it changing in this volatile world that has emerged these last few weeks? That’s not really for me to say, of course; all I can do is whatever is in my means to provide an environment that respects a gender-neutral environment and chain of command whenever I have the privilege of setting the tone.

What is very interesting to me, and what I find to be a very positive (if tardy) side effect of the recent “outing” of men in power who have abused that power, is the celebration of thoughtful women whose thoughtfulness might not have been quite as well-known before. Again, it goes without saying that this should not be something that is remarkable in the least, but for the sake of this particular musing perhaps we can simply acknowledge and agree upon that, and spend our time thinking about what it is that these women are saying.

Reese Witherspoon comes instantly to mind, of course. Ms. Witherspoon has forcefully said that SOP in Hollywood is no longer even a little bit OK when it comes to opportunity to control the spoils of the industry. Not content to simply raise the issue she has literally put her money on the line along with that of like-minded individuals and begun to create those opportunities. Ms. Witherspoon has much to say that is worth hearing. One could do worse than the recent WSJ Magazine cover article as a jumping off point to begin your listen.

It’s highly unlikely that there is any woman in the world about whom more electrons have been circulating of late than the actress Meghan Markle. There’s not a rock big enough for you to have crawled under in the developed world for you to be unaware that she has recently been betrothed to an heir to the British throne. While Ms. Markle and her beau are, indeed, impossibly cute together, it’s more than a bit of a shame that it has taken her very public romance for the non-People reading public to discover her, her story, and her intellect. This is a person of substance.

Hopefully Ms. Markle will forgive me for I will certainly get some of details wrong (as usual I am writing without notes). She is the daughter of a caucasian father and an African-American mother, and she has been on the receiving end of various forms of discrimination from a very young age because of that. She tells a story of being forced to declare in school that she is one or the other, Black or White. To check a box because, well, that’s what is done. She declined. Maybe she was 12. She opted not to opt. I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve been in school, or had a child in school, but that’s a rather gutsy move.

She went home and asked her Dad why. Why should she have to choose? His response informs her message today: draw your own box. Man or woman, if the choices that are presented to you do not include the right choice, draw your own box to check. Ms. Markle tells the story so much better than I, but I am happy to pass it on with a further encouragement that you should go look for her telling this story, and while you are at it there is a wonderful clip of her accepting an award for her advocacy on behalf of empowering women. She is universally described by anyone who has listened to her as a woman of substance.

My hope, and my goal in writing this today, is that the term “woman of substance” will one day be replaced (as I did above) for both men and women with “person of substance”. Substantive ideas matter, and they ought to matter irrespective of whatever labeling might be applied to the holder of those ideas. While they may not have the name recognition of Ms. Witherspoon or Ms. Markle, I am surrounded by women of substance whose ideas bear our listening. My wife and my daughter, my sisters and my mother, my daughters- and sisters-in-law, as well as the extraordinary women with whom I’ve worked in healthcare and met through CrossFit, give me confidence that this can be.

Not today, not yet, not soon enough but soon, for the benefit and betterment of all.

 

Sunday musings 11/26/17, Rigged in Your Favor

Sunday musings…

1) Capulet. Juliet’s last name. No reason; just seems like a cool thing to know.

2) Apokalypsis. Ancient Greek for uncovering or unveiling. I’m not exactly sure why, but this particular derivation of “apocalypse” seems all too appropriate for the last couple of months, eh?

3) Lifetime. After a bit of time I recently tried to access an online place to which I’d once been given a lifetime subscription. It’s one that I used to look at very frequently;my user name and password never changed. I discovered a different sign-in format, one that did not even accept the form of sign-in I’d been accustomed to. “Lifetime” in this case had nothing to do with my longevity, but rather the employment lifetime of the gifter, or the lifetime of institutional awareness of my being.

It leaves one to ponder: how many lifetimes do we have, and what is it that brings any particular lifetime to an end?

4) Babar. I have a thing for watching the end of a series. TV, movies, a particular character in an author’s books. I seem drawn to them even if I had little to no engagement with them over the course of their long or short lifetimes. Just the tiniest bit of introspection leads me to M*A*S*H, a beloved television series that I actually did watch quite religiously. I’m pretty sure that the final episode of M*A*S*H was the first finale I consciously watched as such (thanks again for hosting us all Evan Tabor!).

What’s funny is that I have gone out of my way to put the series finale of shows that I pretty much never watched on my calendar with the same amount of “gotta see it” as those few that I never missed. “St. Elsewhere” was just as much of a must-see as “Hill Street Blues”, for example. Even more interesting–maybe sillier is a better word–I find myself with the same type of nostalgic yearning at the loss for both. Weird.

So it is as I discover that the beloved children’s character “Babar” has made his swan song. With the publication of “Babar’s Guide to Paris” author and artist Laurent de Brunhoff signs off and Babar takes a final bow. There is no heir, and the character is not meant to have any further adventures. After finishing the WSJ interview I know that I will read this book despite the fact that I have read (or been read to) only the original story (written by Laurent’s father Jean) and not a single intervening edition. As avid collectors of children’s books and enthusiastic readers to our children and now grandchildren, this is even more striking.

Why this book, and why now? Well, I have to admit that I’m a sucker for sentiment, and this quote makes it a slam dunk: “I never really think of children when I do my books. Babar was my friend and I invented stories with him, but not with kids in the corner of my mind. I write for myself.”

Who wouldn’t want to spend a few pages with a 92 year old and his friend of some 70 years as they explore the City of Lights together one last time.

5) Rigged. “Live life as if everything is rigged in your favor.” –The Persian poet Rumi (as told by Neda Shamie)

Have you ever heard a more lovely description of optimism? What a smashing way to approach life! In the past I’ve written that one should assume that each endeavor will be a success, that this simple assumption does, indeed, increase the odds that it will happen. So often we hear from people that the game is rigged. Heck, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that every single one of us has felt this at least once in our lifetimes. We all know people who have simply given up on all but sustenance, so completely do they believe that any effort at advancement will be thwarted in a game that is rigged.

But it isn’t.

At least it isn’t if what we aspire to is simply taking that next step up. Sure, if your only definition of “winning the game” is to have Gates/Soros/Koch kind of money, the game is surely not set up for you to succeed. In reality, success (see “Gratitude = Success”) and happiness do not require such an outsized outcome. Therein lies the brilliance of Rumi’s insight. If everything is “rigged in your favor”, if all of your “ducks are in a line” and the deck is stacked for you, why NOT take that opportunity and turn it into your next success? You could certainly accuse me of being a pollyanna here, but heck, doesn’t it feel better to look forward with hope than otherwise?

The game of life is here, today, just waiting for you and me to play a winning hand.

I’ll see you next week…

–bingo

Sunday Protests

One of my all-time, never fails thrills is a pre-game flyover. I get serious chills and a full coat of goosebumps every single time. Doesn’t matter what event follows, or why I’m watching. Unexpected, surprise fly-overs are an even more special treat, that “oh, you’re kidding…I get to see this even AND I get a fly-over?” It’s like getting dessert first at a Michelin starred restaurant. Never having served in any of the branches of our military I have no special call to feel this way. Yet goosebumps arrive on cue whenever a particularly moving rendition of our National Anthem is played, or if I hear Kate Smith or Ray Charles singing one of our other patriotic anthems.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I am quite completely conflicted about the recent protesting of professional athletes done during these tiny interludes of observing our shared nation. I do get, as should all thinking individuals, that the protests themselves are not directed at either the anthem or the flag, and certainly not toward the men and women who have served in the defense of the historical values that these symbols represent. I truly love these tiny moments of patriotic sentimentality. They are, for me, similar to saying “Grace” before our evening meal: a tiny vestige of a once much larger experience.

Sporting events of all kinds used to be a much bigger presence in my life than they are today. Whether playing or watching, it was weird to not have some sort of game front and center. Once I hung up my various sporting implements, and even when I moved away both literally and figuratively from the teams of my youth, I could usually find some sort of sporting event to have on as background noise on a given day. The fact that I watch fewer games, and almost no football, at a time of unprecedented activism on the field is therefore purely coincidental.

Still, I do think about sports, and major sporting events are still a rallying point (or at least a conversation starter) in most walks of my life. To say that this next statement has me conflicted doesn’t really measure up to the truth: the on the field activism of athletes makes me avoid the discussion of sports entirely. It’s not that I feel the athletes have no place expressing their opinions, nor that I necessarily disagree with the opinions they are expressing. The heartfelt conviction that a particular group has been singled out for mistreatment is a righteous cause to which very public individuals could lend their support. By choosing the venue of a sporting event they have removed my ability to choose whether or when I will engage the topic.

By choosing to do it in the manner that they have chosen prevents me from experiencing a tiny thrill that used to at least feel like it was free.

So what? Isn’t that the point of protest, to make the safe and the secure a little bit uncomfortable? Sure, I get that. I really do. It makes little difference to those protesting to learn that people like me really do set aside time to consider the merits of their grievance; creating discomfort is part of the point. Having twice scrubbed my own workplace of all political activity, making it clear that our team is to avoid the creation of similar discomfort in our clients, I sort of feel like my patronage is being abused I guess. Kind of like that old joke “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out”, except it’s a political expression upending my expectation. Certain jobs just don’t mesh with political action in the workplace. Who wants to see their local police officers in uniform and protesting anything at all? Can you imagine listening to your surgeon expound on some controversial topic just as you slip under anesthesia?

You could very well read this and say that my bleating is nothing but one more example of “White privilege” (funny, given my name), the smug mutterings of someone safe and secure and as close to immune from the dangers being discussed. I would understand your position. I would disagree, but I would understand, and more than that I would inherently realize that no amount of discussion on our mutual parts would change your mind. All good. I’m uncomfortable, and a little bit unhappy, and maybe that was always the point.

The risk is that my discomfort may make me stop listening. That’s probably not what the protesters are aiming for.