Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) Spectator. I am missing my friends in Carson as Mrs. bingo and I must remain home for family reasons.

Reasonably sure Mike and Deanna have the whole med team thing covered without the eye doc, though.

2) Milestones. Are you on Linked-In? Among the automatic notifications one receives is the announcement of work anniversaries. For example, this year my connections were informed that I had a 10 year anniversary at SkyVision Centers (aside: huge upset victory).

This morning my FB feed informed me that The Daigle has been Facebook friends with so-and-so for 5 years. Like it’s significant.

I’m going with FB friend anniversaries as a Sign of the Apocalypse.

3) Size. You know the old saw: size matters. In certain settings saying this will set the audience a-twitter, in others it may make one twitterpated. Here, in CrossFit, but specifically while viewing the CrossFit Games, we are seeing that size does, indeed, matter.

I continually return to the classic treatise “What is Fitness” in CFJ #2, Coach Glassman’s seminal article introducing the principles upon which CrossFit has been built. Early in the article he references the differences in build, in size, between various types of athletes, singling out for particular praise those who run the 400 and 800M at the highest levels. Here, at this size and build, is likely to be found the prototype for the ideal expression of fitness as we define it.

What are you seeing this weekend as you watch the Games? What strikes me is the reinforcement of the concepts so elegantly described in CFJ #2. TheDaveCastro has once again put together a witches brew of tests that are revealing the importance of balance in training and its effect on size. Over-emphasize strength, and by doing so emphasize an increase in size? Gonna be tough to haul that extra muscle mass on both a run and 31 times up on a bar muscle-up. Sub-6:00 miles and flying through 100 pull-ups? The size you’ve shed would surely have helped in Heavy DT.

Some things are simply given and cannot be manipulated. The tallest and shortest competitors have all faired less well at the highest levels through no fault of training, for example. While you watch the final day of Games 2015, especially if you have followed this sport for awhile, pay a bit of attention to the changes in size of both the men and the women over the years. I found myself telling Mrs. bingo that so-and-so had gained too much mass this year, obviously over-weighting strength and with performance on other measures correspondingly suffering.

There’s a sweet spot when it comes to performance, one that changes if you value different outcomes. If we are talking about CrossFit and the CrossFit Games, the theoretic sweet spot was predicted years ago by Coach in CFJ #2. Finding the proper size that balances the emphasis among all of the essential characteristics of fitness is part of what it takes to win the CrossFit Games.

4) Change. While we’re on the topic of sweet spots, there’s probably a timeline over which there are optimal times to effect major life changes. For example, true entrepreneurship is quite rare after the age of 45 or so. Most people who are viewed as entrepreneurs don’t really start anything new, or even have any truly new ideas after that age. There are exceptions of course, but they prove the rule for the most part. If you ask them about their breakthrough most will say they are just now acting on something that came to them years earlier.

Which makes me want to ask those exceptions: “why now?”

Change is hard. Even evolutionary change (a catcher is turned into a 3rd baseman in the minors) can be gut-wrenching. The longer you wait to make that change the harder it can be to pull the trigger. Especially if change means leaving something that is OK, or good, or even great. Change is not any easier if you are leaving something less than OK or good, it’s just a bit more…I dunno…inevitable I guess.

And why 45? What’s significant about that mid-40’s thing? Probably the multiplying effect of 25 years of adult connections and the fact that every change you might make now imposes change on someone else I guess. You’re 20 and you walk away from a D1 track scholarship to pursue the CrossFit Games–pretty much just you in that equation. You don’t want to wake up at mid-life and wonder if you could have made a pro team, run with that invention, performed on Broadway, or earned a living as a writer. At 25 you’ll have years to bounce back if it doesn’t turn out. 45, family, comfortable job with a pretty clear and secure 15 years ahead? What a daunting proposition, to consider departing from good for only the chance of great.

Who’s to say which is the harder choice with the greatest personal consequences, to make the change or to walk away, forever unsure of what might have been.

I’ll see you next week…

Facebook has been accused of many things, but of late I’ve been hearing more and more about how unhappy reading other people’s timelines makes some folks. Apparently their own lives, or at least how they view their lives, seems to pale in comparison to what is being posted on someone else’s FB page. I actually used this to poke fun at a professional friend. I accused him of purposefully trying to make my life seem lame by posting pictures of himself at the NCAA Final Four and the Masters.

We can use CrossFit as a useful analogy with which to understand this phenomenon. Real life in many ways is more like the CrossFit Games than it is like CrossFit training. In the Games we have winners and non-winners; in the Box we have you vs. you. We are trained it seems from early in life to not only compare ourselves with others, but to allow ourselves to be compared BY others. In this we somehow allow the creation of a zero-sum game of our own sense of self, and we allow the scores to be kept by others as well as ourselves.

Kinda like all those singing contests now on TV; the judges are supposed to be judging only the contestant singing at the moment, the contestant to be focused only on herself and the judges. Invariably though, both judges and judged compare the contestant with others, for this is an openly zero-sum game. Someone will only win because everyone else lost. There is a subset of Facebook users for whom posting and viewing is a win-lose thing.

I’m more than OK with this for the CrossFit Games, and I’m quite fine with this for all of those silly contests (which I admit are a guilty pleasure in the White house). There is a real problem, however, if we allow this kind of process, this kind of judging, to be a metric for how we view ourselves. We have an unavoidable frame of reference bias that threatens even the healthiest among us when we use external controls like Facebook to judge our internal view of our own outcomes.

Why? Well, we tend to compare our “behind the scenes” moments, our rehearsals and our trial runs, with everyone else’s “highlight reels.” We are not usually privy to someone else’s dry runs, the failed efforts that eventually culminate in the masterpiece before us. We cannot forget our own struggles, the efforts we ourselves have made out of the limelight, and we all too often use these memories as the “compare to” when we evaluate ourselves against others.

I’m reminded of a story that my Mom  tells often and well. I am one of 4. We were pretty successful youngsters, at least in the eyes of the community and  by the standards then in place by which we (and by extension my Mom and Dad) were measured. My Mom would listen as fellow parents bemoaned this or that child-rearing difficulty, often followed by “oh Anne Lee, you wouldn’t know anything about this; your kids are all [whatever].” Mom would politely nod and smile, all the while thinking “oh boy…if you only knew!”

You see, my Mother remembered all of the hard work, the heartaches when her kids disappointed and the battles fought so that they, the kids, might succeed. The other parents were comparing their “behind the scenes” experiences with my Mom’s “highlight reel”, but she knew better. She couldn’t help but remember her own “work in the gym” so to speak.

What’s the ultimate lesson here? We all compare, and we are all compared. It would be simply lovely if life were a non-zero sum game but alas, ’tis not. The lesson is as simple as making sure that you are always comparing things that are alike. Your rehearsals with someone else’s rehearsal. Their highlight reel, perhaps shared on Facebook, with yours.

When you are comparing apples to apples you must be sure that you are either looking at the fruit itself, or recalling the labor required to fill the basket.

Got any of this–manufactured importance– in your life? Not sure? Of course you’re not sure. It’s likely that YOU are the one who manufactured whatever it is in the first place.

We have a massive social media initiative at my day job. Lots and lots of positive feedback from others in my industry (who are too far away to compete with us), and yet that’s all it’s been…compliments. ROI, meh, not so much. And yet there it is, an enormous sink hole of time, and more importantly MY time. But is it really important?

Where are your stress points? Who put them there? Who is rating their importance? How real is that importance? Tough questions, whether you have ultimate control over the majority of your choices and your time or not. I kinda do. Have control, that is. Yet it was pointed out to me what an inordinate amount of time and angst, how much importance, has grown up around this SM thing. The program is an outgrowth of our continual need to grow, sure, but is this the program that will allow us to achieve our goals More importantly, is it really important enough for us and to me for me to personally carry the load?

Not sure, but the the “ah HA” moment when the concept of “manufactured” rather than essential, integral, irreducible and ineluctable, was applied. I’m gonna think a (short) bit on this i the office today; if it’s real I should be able to make the call between lunch and quitting time. It’s a great exercise, a great filter to apply to the “important” (non-family) aspects of a life.

Whadday think? Looking at the time sinks in your life, how important are they and is that importance real?

As we move more and more of our communication to electronic routes I find it more and more common that I misunderstand someone or they misunderstand me. I suppose this is partly due to the shorthands that we have all fallen for. These written shortcuts are sometimes as difficult to parse as a doctor’s handwriting, both of which are lacking because the author is trying very hard to save time (trust me on the doctor thing; that’s all it is).

And so we have the emoticon, the little figures that have been spawned by the ubiquitous smiley face, to help us express the emotional intent of the author. These, too, are lacking for they cannot truly convey the same subtlety as an upturned corner of the mouth, a flaring nostril, or the slight tremor in an angry voice. It’s important to keep this in mind each time we communicate in this manner, here and elsewhere.

There is, for example, no emoticon for a wry chuckle.

The White family is moving. Beth has declared that the “Netty Empsters” shall live in a one-level abode. Furthermore, she has decreed that said abode shall occupy ~50% of the land and air now taken up by the dwelling “White house” in which I’ve lived for 21 years. Let the purge begin!

The challenge is in part rather prosaic: what do I/we/you need? There’s really no doubt that there is plenty of extra around here. Plenty of stuff and clutter. Where, though, does one draw the line between necessary, desirable, and…I dunno…neither? Once the line is drawn where does one dispose of “neither”?

I’ve got two very real problems with this process, one understandable and one irrational and silly. The silly one: what if I pitch something, only to discover later that I wanted it? Or worse, NEEDED it? That really is just silly; anything I truly need will be obtainable in a pinch, and anything I think I want will likely be forgotten by my next meal. Yet however silly and however irrational, I still worry over that as I sift through stuff.

The understandable one is a little more poetic and has to do with the totems of my past, those little knickknacks that tease out an equally little smile each time I stumble across them. Even if “stumbling across them” only occurs during a purge. Pictures, yearbooks, trivial little souvenirs of trips and places mostly forgotten.

Only, not really.

It’s that tiny connection to an event or a place or a person, or all three, that I most fear losing. Is this irrational, too? Or worse, is this also silly? I don’t dwell in the past, mine or anyone’s really. I don’t really spend very much time there at all. Yet each of us has a little collection of memories–some real and some (like last week’s musings) just little lies that we choose to believe–that are bathed in a soft sunlight of something that could be called “happy”.

Perhaps it’s generational. Will my kids (and both of you other kids out there their age reading this) ever experience what my darling Beth and I did in our garage yesterday as time stood still, frozen again and again by a picture, a seashell, some trinket? I sure don’t know, but that doesn’t really help me as I sift through the delights and the detritus of a house filled with 21 years of Clan White, and the stored 32 years of memories that came before. The memories and their “triggers” rest in my hands at this moment, not among the electrons dancing across the internet to someday rest in a place that may never need purging.

The rational, actionable answer probably lies there: utilize the tech of the present to preserve the memories of the past. It’s different, though. It really is. Much like the difference between turning the pages of a real newspaper, one made of real paper, and swiping through the same sentences on the device of the moment. The words are the same and the information is transferred equally effectively, only not.

Physically clipping an article or a picture and then carefully husbanding that memory over time, physically, is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from clicking “save” to either Instapaper or Evernote. It takes so little effort to do that latter that there’s no commitment to the memory! I look at a photo on FB, often one of 100+ in an album, and it’s…different.

I think that’s it, really. Commitment. Each time I sift through “stuff”, be it photos or books or trinkets, I make a tiny little on-going commitment to a particular memory when that little trigger goes back in the box, and the box goes back in my house. I make a tiny little commitment to the people who were a part of that memory (usually without ever telling them), a commitment that I will continue to remember them, to remember when being with them made me happy.

Will it be the same for our SM-centric, cloud-connected younger generations? Will it be the same for me and for Mrs. bingo as we go forward, hopefully not done creating tiny memories that will one day elicit those same tiny smiles? Will something be there to prompt them or us to open those virtual boxes that store the trinkets, that store the memories?

I only know that today I am visited by memories, by the people who populate my past, as they compete for a place in my present, the survivors of this latest purge. The ones that still make me smile.

At this moment the White family is experiencing the exquisite torture of communication within the context of a very sick loved one who is in the ICU. Multiple consultants, all new to the family. Very bright people who are nonetheless rather unsophisticated with regard to medicine and medical discussions. That’s a really good topic in itself, and I’m pretty sure I will find the need to offload all kinds of baggage here as that saga progresses. For today, though, what I’m interested in is the communication that is taking place WITHIN our family, one that is highly charged emotionally, and one that is taking place across three generations.

Where does the responsibility lie when we enter into a conversation? Let’s define a conversation as the interaction between two people during which there is a purposeful transfer of some kind of information. Let’s refine that by saying that in this day and age we cannot define a conversation as simply as two people talking with one another. We have email, texts, FB chats and PM’s, Twitter @’s and PM’s, phone calls and Skype, and of course plain old face-2-face talking.

So where does the responsibility lie to ensure effective transfer of information? Upon whom does it rest to make sure that facts or ideas have been successfully transmitted and received? How about the emotional content, the feelings that ride along with the data? Sometimes the emotional content is really the data that’s intended for transfer and is quite obvious, like the color guard accompanying a General. Oft times, though, the feelings attached to the words are as carefully and craftily hidden as a stowaway on a cruise ship.

Here’s my bid: the responsibility lies on BOTH sides of the conversation. Active listening is key. Engaging in the conversation means engaging the individual on the other side. It starts at the very choice of vehicle: to whom am I sending this message? On the receiving end the vehicle should also be evaluated: who sent this to me? Think about it…the universe of topics you would engage with your 75 yo grandparents via text is awfully darned small, and if you are a grandparent who texts you can’t “receive” disrespect in a message filled with contractions and lingo.

A Facebook status update is like a billboard, meant to be one-way, neither demanding nor expecting a reply. A conversation, on the other hand, is by definition bi-lateral. It requires active listening and anticipatory listening on the part of both people. It requires a shared understanding of the power as well as the limitation of each method one might choose to utilize. The smaller vehicle (text, Tweet) creates the greater distance and so must transfer the more basic information. More nuance or emotional content requires a different vehicle, at once larger (to include the details) and smaller and more intimate (so that everything can be seen as well as heard).

In the end we are social creatures, driven always to connect. The rules of communication have not really changed despite our ever-increasing ability to communicate, to connect. The more important the interaction the closer we must be to the other. Communication, no matter what vehicle we choose, requires that we listen better. Listen to what is said to us; listen to what we say; listen to what the other hears.

The responsibility for a successful communication is shared equally by both involved. Despite our newfangled world filled with different ways to communicate the most effective strategy hasn’t changed in a few thousand years:

Listen better.